ABN AMRO has implemented an advanced Trading Strategy Management engine to enhance the capabilities of its Equity Advanced Execution Services Desk.
The rules engine and its suite of auto-trade tools, developed by Apama, will extend ABN AMRO’s range of trading and execution services and support the bank’s increasing trading volumes and growing client base.
Gijsbert de Lange, Head of Advanced Execution Services at ABN AMRO said:
“Our ability to provide excellent client service through speed and flexibility is always a priority as we strive to achieve and maintain a market leading position. As such, it is imperative that we invest heavily in the best technology both directly and through partnerships with technology vendors that are leading the market.”
The initial implementation focuses on ABN AMRO’s programme trading capabilities. Commercial clients will benefit from the bank’s ability to place large programs in the market at flexible intervals according to dynamic trading rules, and manage and modify orders in the market as conditions change in real-time.
ABN AMRO selected Apama’s Event Manager, Scalability and Management Environment, and Platform Development Environment technologies to support its existing program trading infrastructure with a flexible, reliable and scalable real-time trading platform. Originally deployed as a proof of concept in December 2003, the technology was developed as a production application and went live in January 2004.
De Lange continued: “In this instance, we needed to introduce a common, real-time technology platform which integrated easily with our existing technologies and would allow us to develop and introduce individual electronic trading applications quickly and easily. We chose Apama to provide the flexible, functionally-rich and highly-scaleable engine to our high-end product.”
In the future, ABN AMRO intends to develop a range of real-time, automated trading tools that integrate with its existing trading user interfaces and back-end systems. These will be developed using the mature and powerful APIs that form part of Apama’s real-time event processing and action execution technologies.
Peter Beard, CEO, Apama (UK), commented: “This project has been an exciting collaboration between Apama and ABN AMRO. With the robust base of Apama’s leading-edge Trading Strategy Management platform, the two companies have worked together to deliver ABN AMRO with the tools to develop its own trading applications.”
The initial roll-out required connectivity to ABN AMRO’s existing technology infrastructure, including direct connectivity to MS SQL Server, interfaces to GL Trade, Royal Blue and Reuters data feeds, and integration with a large number of proprietary applications. ABN AMRO will run the Apama technology on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The client API for integration with existing user interfaces is written in C++.