Introduced a new feature to optimise the process workflow.

To optimise the process workflow, we introduced a new feature, “Replace”, keeping the Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocol in mind. It significantly eased the process of modifying an existing trade. The ‘Replace’ feature changed the way trades had to be modified. Earlier, the client was struggling to modify their existing trades as it took a lot of manual effort to do so. It was a complex procedure as trades had to be cancelled and needed to be placed all over again.

Now, this process has been reduced to a single step of just replacing the current trade with the new one.

This solution also removes the redundant transactions in the entire system from the front office to the downstream applications.

Capacitated the system for compliance with regulatory requirements

The MiFID II regulations were instituted in the EU to protect the interests of the investors within the financial markets. In a case where investment banks fail to comply with the requirements of regulatory conditions, huge fines are levied by the authorities. It is a mandate that systems comply with it; within the stipulated deadline. Our team ensured the complete re-evaluation of the application and enabled it to comply with this regulation. It required exhaustive study of each and every clause of the regulation and sophisticated software engineering expertise to ensure that all trades comply with them.

Giving the system an infrastructural The application was not following proper architectural and design principles to remain resilient in the face of system failure or downtime. It was tightly coupled with the front office components, and dependencies were so high that if there were any error, failure, or upgrade in the front office systems, the middleware application would be stalled. We enabled an architectural overhaul to ensure the decoupling of components. This minimised the dependency of the application on external components and made it more responsive and resilient.

Revamp the entire trade settlement and clearance process Getting trades cleared is an important step. Often a trader will submit a Front Office Trade, which then flows through the Middle Office and Back Office through various systems to settle the trade so that money is exchanged. In this, a clearing house ensures that both parties carry on the financial transaction ethically and buyers & sellers adhere to the contractual obligations. Earlier, the investment bank had to approach every clearing house in the European markets so that individual trades could be cleared, which proved to be a costly and time-consuming process. We helped the investment bank’s system to integrate with an external centralised clearing menu. Now, the trades are automatically cleared by the centralizedcentralised system, which acts as a bridge between the investment bank and individual clearing houses in all European markets.

Restructuring how commissions are handled A commission is a service charge levied by the broker in exchange for investment advice or handling the buy-and-sell process. In case of a disagreement on the commission rate between the two parties, the trade would not be processed and would throw an exception in the application. The trader would have to resolve this situation manually on paper. After our intervention, a lot of manual effort was cut down as such orders could be processed digitally within the application.

Migration to an in-house event streaming platform We stepped up in the migration from an open-source event streaming platform to an in-house, proprietary framework. The investment bank wanted to ensure that all the bank’s systems rely on the AMPS (Advanced Message Processing System) framework instead of Kafka, and we assisted them in the endeavor.

With all these, we also helped our partner in

• New deployments & releases.
• Keeping them aligned with the regulatory disclaimers which helps in preventing any untoward activities while trades are being executed.
• End-to-end testing of the newly developed functionalities, user acceptance testing of the product in the UAT environment and subsequently releasing the same on production.