Replace paper-based trade booking and confirmation for a variety of financial brokerage products – Bank Loans, NDFs, Metal Spot, Exotic IRS, etc. – with electronic trade capture systems within three months in order to meet a Sarbanes-Oxley deadline.
The Solution
Build an automated trade capture system using Excel COM that allowed business users to define data fields, format, and validation and to auto-generate a new trade capture solution complete with datastore.
Key Features
Quick Turnaround
Allowed business analysts to define, configure, and deploy trade capture systems within hours.
SOA
Initially, the system passed XML trade messages to a confirmations web service where the data was transformed against XSL-FO. Later, the system was later modified to pass trades directly into the SOA via a TIBCO gateway.
Extendable
Because the solution was built using Excel COM, business analysts could easily extended functionality by using Excel functions or Excel VBA – and often was.
Longevity
Although initially developed in response to meet a tight deadline, the system was still being used six years later in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific.
Surprising what you can do with Excel given a tight deadline, heaps of ingenuity, and plenty of application. It is an immensely flexible tool.
Longevity
One of the best pieces of work I’ve done, not because it was perfect or infallible, because it wasn’t. It was, however, adaptable, flexible, and still being used on multiple trading desks in three continents six years later when I left.
