British Arab Commercial Bank (BACB)
Provision of a real-time, front office deal capture and position-keeping solution to a tier 3 bank headquartered in London.
Background
BACB is a wholesale bank and a leading provider of trade and project finance for Arab and Mediterranean markets. Based in London, BACB offers its clients a full range of Treasury products, market making and price quoting facilities in all major and emerging Arab and Mediterranean currencies. With the number of convertible currencies increasing in this region, it gives BACB market making opportunities within this niche market, thereby offering exporters and importers (and their bankers) prices to cover exchange and interest rate risks.
The Bank needed to replace its front end system with a ‘state of the art’ front-end solution. The front end application was an out dated enhanced DOS-based solution, which had become increasingly difficult to upgrade, although core product functionality was sound. The Bank wished to realise a number of key benefits, notably:
- Significant reduction of the on-going cost of maintaining an ageing system which was difficult to support and maintain;
- To deliver a high-performance, scalable, leading-edge technology solution;
- The ability to rapidly deploy new instruments and customisations on demand;
- To use a solution built on a proven business engine with scope for enhancement to meet future business needs;
- To create a modern Front Office Dealing Application for quick execution.
- To create a stable environment for a seamless front to back office STP solution
The Bank required a front-end solution, that if required, could be expanded to encompass a greater product range to offer its clients in the emerging Arab and Mediterranean markets, backed up by the relevant management of positions, and P&L, and a major client driven customisation, for counterparty multi product exposure management, and deal by deal money market risk exposure reporting. The client required a dynamic front end trading solution in order to achieve this
Implementation
After a pre-sales implementation study was performed, which proved Eurobase’s capability of meeting the Bank’s requirements, BACB commissioned Eurobase to implement Siena.
The implementation study consisted of discussions with various representatives and traders, technical and operations representatives from BACB. During this time all business and technology requirements were clarified, thereby confirming all of BACB’s required functionality.
The functional scope of the project covered the following main business areas:
- FX products Spot, Outright, Option Dated Outrights / Forwards, Swaps, and internal arbitrage capabilities.
- MM products (Term MM Loans and Deposits, Call Money, CD’s secondary and primary issue, Discount instruments and FRN’s)
- Limit monitoring
- Money market accrual and NPV profit and loss management
- FX real time profit and loss management.
- Customer rollovers
- Nostro / Position Rollovers with / without cost of carry
- Ability to deal across client retail accounts
- CLS ticket and positioning capability (BACB 3rd party member)
- Blotters, Position Keeping and customised reporting
- Tickets
- Audit
- User Password protected, with multi level security and permissions
- Interfacing to BACB’s back office system
- Interfacing to Reuters conversation dealing and matching and EBS
- Real time database updates
Result
Eurobase successfully delivered the core application along with all requested customisations. On completion of BACB’s acceptance testing and of the Eurobase training, the Bank successfully went live in Q3 2003.
Since going live with Siena, external interfaces have also been implemented through Eurobase’s Siena Gateway, which have enhanced BACB’s trade and price execution, with seamless connectivity to major bank Internet portals, enabling fast and efficient STP of tickets.
In future the Bank is looking to benefit further from Eurobase’s product ‘road map’ development and through additional customisations of the product.
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