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IT CONSULTING - INVESTMENT BANKING
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Financial markets are in a constant state of evolution and over the
past tens of years, owing to the invention of computers and the
development of quantitative tools for market analysis, the pace
of this change has increased dramatically in which all financial
research requires not only efficient data storage capabilities, but analysis
and construction of models and forecasts using various technology solutions.
In an effort to construct these technology solutions, very large number
of simple systems have been built again and again and again. However,
these simple systems do not result in maintainable excess returns and firms
have to actually implement their long term plans resulting in the development
of large and complex trading system applications and processes associated
with them. These complex systems require certain level of expertise
which sometimes firms do not have and external consultants are hired to help.
That is where we come in. Our consultants have worked in major
investment banks which are among the largest in the world such as Barclays
Capital, Deutsche Bank, BP and HSBC to name a few.
While working in their trading environments (front, middle and back office)
in these organisations, our consultants have developed and maintained many
trading applications ranging from order management, risk management and reporting,
confirmation and settlement systems.
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The financial institutions have invested heavily in their cutting edge
technologies to automate the tasks of assisting their trading environments
and as a result, there is always a need for highly qualified finance background
IT professionals in their technology areas who understand both, the technology
and the business.
This is the area where we can help with our years of experience to get the
best return on investments in IT products and technologies.
We do this in two ways: first, we support IT teams with shared knowledge
and second, we work directly with the teams on architecture and planning
to help businesses move forward with their IT initiatives that deliver the
most business value by deploying and optimising their IT services
to proactively manage IT landscape.
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Trade applications can be divided into their functional areas such as
front middle and back office applications.
Front Office is literally the bank's interface with the market.
A trader uses order management system to place the order, issue the notice
of trade execution and utilise provided market data.
This order then passes through a risk management matrix in the middle office
which is a series of risk management checks an order undergoes before
it is forwarded to the exchange. Here the data is analysed and every risk
is assessed to a satisfying level for the trade to be validated for its profitability.
Back office department performs the trade confirmation,
clearing and settlement activities. A custodian works in the interest
of the institution that has engaged its services on behalf of its
institutional clients who specialise in taking positions and holding it.
On successful execution, the trade confirmation is sent to the institution.
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In regards to the technology used, let us analyse the technology solutions
that most organisations are using until recently. C/C++ stands out as the most
favorable candidate in designing front-office systems, and the primary reason
behind such a decision is the multitude of resources offered by the language.
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C/C++ offers a broad range of programming features to equip developers so that they
could deal with all spectrums of programming such as the operating system,
graphical user interface, network, multithreaded programming, and so on.
Back-office systems are designed using rapid application development (RAD)
tools such as Visual Basic and are backed with extremely powerful relational
database management systems (RDBMSs) such as SQL Server or Sybase.
Finally, a middle-office system’s implementation varies and is mainly driven by
the business requirements. If a lot of analytics are involved that require
complex mathematical calculations, then Microsoft Excel is the primary programming tool.
There is no doubt that when performance forms the key factor to success of the
trading business, and that is why C/C++ is used but with a very time-consuming
coding tasks and hard-to-detect memory leaks faced in a production environment.
This is where .NET came to the rescue. It fills many of the gaps and also
answers many of the key decisions in determining the platform selection.
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The whole programming model was revisited and reengineered from the ground up,
giving birth to the common language runtime (CLR). The CLR is a modern run-time
system and welcomes developers into a new "managed world" where managed code is
written in a managed language and executed in a managed environment.
The CLR provides the execution environment and other core services to managed code
that form one of the strong foundations in designing a robust and
secure application.
.NET as a language offers rich programming features and also overcomes most of the
deficiencies that were evident in the earlier Windows programming languages.
Because of this, .NET gave impetus to major financial organizations to look at
their business realms and reconsider their decisions
and investments. .NET clearly provides all the features of a good programming language
While it is easy to discuss converting old systems to this ideal situation or developing
new systems using this .NET framework, the resources are not always available to
perform these strategic goals. As our mission statement confirms,
we help organisations at this point to master Microsoft technologies and provide
better tools and resources to trading environments.
Please contact us to find out more about our capabilities and case studies
of our achievements while working in investment banking environments, and give us a chance.
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