OTC Valuation by SGSS

Given all the recent attention that OTC derivatives have received (see Geithner letter), then a topical update on the work we have done with Societe Generale Security Services (SGSS) on OTC and structured product valuation services has been written up on Securities Industry News. The work involved extensive integration with Mysis Summit, where our TimeScape data and analytics management system is used to provide "Golden Copy" of market, reference and derived data for the derivative products being valued. The section on TimeScape says:

"The Summit FT solutions are integrated with SGSS' market data software tool TimeScape, licensed from London's Xenomorph in November 2007. This produces a "golden copy" of end-of-day prices from 15 different information suppliers. The unit also processes information related to 70 different currencies and 5,000 volatility surfaces, which give three-dimensional views of how much and fast a security can move up or down. With Summit's product, each surface can include between 200 and 500 data points."

From talking to some of the SGSS team at our recent user group, the thing they most seem to value about TimeScape is its ease of use in describing and managing any kind of product, allowing product and market data specialists to use and customise the system without the need for specialist technology knowledge. This echos some of the things that were said about TimeScape after a demo to Lab49 last year. 

High Performance Spreadsheets

Another article about the operational risk generated by the usage of spreadsheets within the financial markets (see earlier posts), appeared in the April issue of Waters Magazine.
 
The articles highlights how spreadsheets are largely used within financial institutions and suggests that the current regulation requirements for more transparency and ad-hoc risk management might push the proliferation of spreadsheets even further. The articles also refers to the progress and improvements made by Microsoft in recent versions of Excel to increase the security of spreadsheets.
 
Xenomorph has worked closely with Microsoft on hosting its time series database within SQL Server 2008. The case study we have written together describes how SQL Server 2008 offers integration within Office Excel 2007 so that whilst the spreadsheet is still the end-user viewing tool, operational risk is reduced by engaging Excel 2007 as an analytics and reporting tool and not as a mean of storing data.
 
Our TimeScape solution offers more than 700 easy to use add-in functions to Office Excel 2007 and we are currently working on the use of Excel Services, part of Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007, to further enhance the centralized approach to spreadsheet.
 
If you are interested in how Xenomorph solves the problem of spreadsheet management, then take a look at our (newly updated) website. Here we explain how to solve the problem and how Xenomorph Spreadsheet Inside technology can bring unstructured spreadsheet data and complex calculation within a centralized data management system, increasing transparency and reducing operational risk.

Here today. Where tomorrow?

These may be the words on the lips of many bankers today, as they survey the continuing turmoil in global financial markets. In fact, this was the incredibly apposite tagline on a recent magazine advertisement for a major bank which (maybe unsurprisingly) was subsequently nationalised.

In the fluid (many would say “bloody”) landscape of financial services, with the next merger or acquisition just around the corner, it means that now, more than ever, data integration is a growing challenge. Accompanying this activity is the ever-growing need for consistency, accuracy, transparency and control of both the data itself and the movement of that data.

Data architecture itself is an evolving discipline and one approach worth looking at is data federation – deftly described in an article by Dain Hansen. Basically, the approach is to leave the data where it is but aggregate it into a single view, available as a service to your applications. It is an approach that Xenomorph has advocated for many years, going back to our founding days in the mid-90s, with the normalized database driver approach implemented in our Connectivity Services.

Hansen’s article explains both the advantages (simplicity, no need to copy or synchronize) and the disadvantages (performance) of this approach, and argues for a solution that incorporates both federation and consolidation of data. He shows that it is possible to architect a system that will provide consistency and control as well as agility.

It’s difficult to say whether better data management would have assisted the world’s banks in avoiding their current troubles, but greater transparency of where exactly their exposures lay would certainly have helped.

Time Series inside SQL Server

Case study of some of the work we have been doing with Microsoft on hosting our time series storage inside SQL Server has just gone up on their site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001637

Best Instrument Data Model?

Some positive feedback about instrument and market data model within our data management system TimeScape:

http://mdavey.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/xenomorph-best-data-modelling/