Context

The client wished to become more competitive within the FX (foreign currency exchange) trading sector.

Problem

A series of home-made pricing, quoting, order management and post trade routing systems were reaching the end of their useful lifespan.  These legacy systems were a series of monolithic components communicating via shared memory services on a single host machine, severely limiting the possibility for increased parallel pricing, quoting and order processing. As a result the pricing offered to the bank's clients was often "near market" which lead to uncompetitive prices, lower than expected trading volumes and occasional trading losses.  The java technology used in these systems was not mainstream and some implementation patterns were too opaque and brittle to allow any significant performance improvements.

Solution

After discussions with several business stakeholders, we advised that the client should explore commoditized trading system offerings from reputable vendors.  The client then engaged in an RfP process with a shortlist of prospective vendors, resulting in the selection of a cloud-based trading solution.

We then provided a series of architectural artifacts in the form of static component and dynamic sequence diagrams to support the client's wider integration roadmap. The client then instructed us to develop and deliver several key integration component adapters written in Java Spring Boot running as scalable containerized applications in the following use cases:

  • CID Lookup services to ensure Swiss banking secrecy compliance
  • Post Trade integration with mid office position keeping systems
  • Configuration UI and adapter (to compensate for shortfalls in the vendor platform's own configuration UI's)
  • Archiving services for compliance
  • Client order life-cycling logging services
  • Market data capture for analytics use cases
  • A mission critical Indicative pricing service for non-trading use cases such as bank tellers and cash machines

Measurable Impact

Migrating to a commoditized trading platform lead to a 200% daily increase in profitability for the client's FX department. This gain is attributed to improved pricing, quoting and order latencies leading to more attractive pricing and ultimately higher client trading volumes.