Wall Street Systems says Scotia Capital has implemented its treasury engine to handle its global foreign exchange trading operations. The system went live on 19 May 2003. The implementation at Scotia Capital follows an initial roll-out of The Wall Street System treasury engine at Scotiabank’s US funding operation in New York.
The bank’s primary foreign exchange dealing rooms, located in Toronto, Tokyo and London, as well as its three regional sales centers, located in New York, Calgary and Montreal, were migrated on to The Wall Street System treasury engine. The aim, says Wall Street Systems, was to improve straight-through-processing rates, achieve greater transparency of risk exposures and performance measurement across the organization, and reduce the overhead required to maintain multiple in-house and third party provided systems.
Wall Street Systems says Scotia Capital has realized a significant reduction in processing costs by bringing all its foreign exchange operations together on a single system. The Wall Street System treasury engine has replaced four separate trading, limit monitoring, static data and transaction processing systems, together with all associated interfaces, previously operating within the bank. The bank has further streamlined its support infrastructure by establishing a centralized, 24-hour, global processing operations center in Toronto.
Scotia Capital’s Technology Application Group undertook significant strategic development in conjunction with the implementation of The Wall Street System treasury engine. Their efforts in the areas of payment interface security and cross-system fallback / disaster recovery have been presented to Revenue Canada for recognition under the Scientific Research and Experimental Development provisions of the Income Tax Act.
The Wall Street System treasury engine provides trading, pricing, position and operational risk management tools. The implementation at Scotia Capital also included significant new development by Wall Street Systems in the areas of free format confirmation matching, sales margin attribution and rules-based transaction routing.
“We now have a single global engine, facilitating increased informational transparency, scalability and growth across the organization,” says Barry Wainstein, managing director and global head of foreign exchange and precious metals at Scotia Capital. “The Wall Street System has provided us with superior exposure management and business unit aggregation capabilities, improved risk analytics and risk mitigation tools, access to workflow and process controls to reduce operational risk, plus far greater efficiencies from the single back office. Wall Street Systems helped us meet our implementation objectives by working with us, as an extension of our internal team, throughout the process.”
Steve Middlehurst, chief operating officer at Wall Street Systems, added: “The ambitious single-day roll-out strategy at Scotia Capital involved a great deal of collaboration between our two companies and enabled us to build a very close working partnership with Scotiabank Group. We look forward to extending this relationship further in the future. We’re also eager to re-use the knowledge we have gained as a result of this ‘big bang’ approach to a global implementation and envisage that this will become the new model for the deployment of The Wall Street System going forward.”