WestLB AG went into production recently with Quartets ActivePivot software to generate and maintain, in real-time, various position screens across the money market and foreign exchange product. In the world of FX and cash management, real-time is a necessity and WestLB needed a platform that would allow them to not only cater to the demanding volumes the foreign exchange business brings, but also able to handle heavy market data refreshes that would continually be changing the calculations and data the front office would need to view.
A wide variety of reports were required to give traders the flexibility to see P&L, risk and cash flows by counterparty, currency pairs, books. All the screens needed to update in real-time in response to both market data changes and new trade business. It was also important to be able to see views broken out by time bucket and drill down to the cash flow dates. The reports show cash flows and cash balances, mark to market, intra-day P&L, month-to-date and year-to-date P&L. In addition to the P&L and inventory reports, a real-time blotter was required showing trading activity with additional data displayed including trade valuation and P&L.
Using ActivePivots flexible and unique object-based, in-memory, real-time aggregation OLAP engine, WestLB are now able to provide the flexibility to integrate the traders requirements – in terms of both business logic and the ability to slice & dice the data any way they want to see it. WestLB were also able to put in place a SOA tool that has a cost structure compatible with their ROI requirements which enabled them to provide the same level of functionality that they had with a leading FX trading system – but at a fraction of the cost.
With ActivePivot, WestLB can now:
enjoy rationalization of systems which provided immediate cost saving to the bank provide the seamless user experience they were seeking deliver the real-time requirements to the business users with excellent performance and scalability have complete control over the system due to ActivePivots pluggable architecture allowing them to be independent from vendor have the ability to grow and scale the business as volumes grow, and have the capacity to extend the product further themselves in the future
fulfill the promise of SOA due to ActivePivots use of open standards such as MDX, XMLA, Web Services, etc. supply the traders with the ability to view the data directly in Microsoft Excel with either a template view (pre-built standard views) or create their own views/reports/blotters with full drill-down and drill-through capabilities and do this totally on their own fulfill the ROI promise as the project was implemented quickly and total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.
WestLB now has the framework to provide their front and middle office with true real-time reporting capabilities along with the more advanced benefits of OLAP technology to investigate that data at many levels, with full slice & dice functionality. With this first application complete, WestLB can now turn to using ActivePivot for other applications that would require this same unique real-time functionality.
D.C.