Over 24 months, Citi replaced 27 European Risk Treasury branch systems that were more than 20 years old with a new platform, Intellect from Polaris Software Labs. The project was completed by October 2006, with all replacements made on time and to budget. In addition, the systems incorporated 43 enhancements, which was double the number anticipated, and the judges were impressed by the size and breadth of the project.
Back-Office Project Winner:
Euroclear with platform consolidation
As principal policy advisor of the European Commission’s Clearing and Settlement Advisory and Monitoring Group, Alberto Giovannini’s first barrier to a consolidated European securities market is technology and the lack of standards. As a result, many institutions across Europe are reviewing clearing and settlement activities and working out how to resolve the issues in this field. Euroclear demonstrated a clear commitment to this issue and has started to consolidate its disparate platforms across Belgium, Netherlands, France, the UK and Ireland onto a single platform. Comprising three phased stages, the platform will be delivered by 2010. This entry wins for achieving the first critical milestones in terms of phase one, which involved bringing together the Euroclear France, CrestCo UK and Euroclear Bank systems in 2007. Euroclear Belgium and Nederland are set to follow in 2008. By the time the project is completed in 2010, Euroclear will have implemented a single securities settlement engine (SSE) for Europe, generating savings of more than €300m a year for a €100m investment.
Commended: Morgan Stanley/Thunderhead with Document Generation Platform. Morgan Stanley’s implementation of Thunderhead’s platform automated the OTC derivatives trade confirmations process during 2006. The project improved confirmation generation time from 15 minutes to less than a minute per confirmation and supported a 300% growth in business from Q4 2005 to Q4 2006 without any subsequent increase in headcount. As a result, the judges felt this worthy of commendation.
Architecture Project Winner:
Merrill Lynch/ ColdSpark with network replacement
Merrill Lynch had an issue with its backbone SMTP network in terms of security, compliance and operational gaps, and was determined to replace the network in 2006. Using ColdSpark’s SparkEngine solution, Merrill Lynch replaced the complete SMTP backbone across the institution. For such a mission critical application, this required excellence in project management and delivery, and the judges felt this stood head and shoulders above the other entries for this reason. The project risk was a critical factor, in particular, and made this very challenging.
ColdSpark CEO Kelly Wanser says: “E-mail is the leading form of communication for financial institutions, enabling most business activities. Yet, the core technology for moving and processing e-mail is more than 20 years old, leading to static e-mail infrastructure laden with complexity, inefficiencies and risk.
“Financial institutions are rapidly upgrading legacy e-mail infrastructure to increase revenues, contain costs and mitigate compliance and security risks. ColdSpark stands out because our flagship product, the SparkEngine, is the only modern enterprise upgrade for a pervasive and critical part of the most used application in the enterprise.”
Data Processing Project Winner:
StreamBase and Wall Street on Demand with Stream Processing Engine
Wall Street on Demand (WSOD) has to process large volumes of data from multiple sources and provide investment research for investors worldwide. To revolutionise the processing and analysis of data to meet exacting client demands, WSOD chose StreamBase’s Stream Processing Engine to provide a scalable data stream processing engine. It provides high-speed processing, near-zero latency, scalability and value.
The judges selected this project as a winner because of the large user base for the service and the efficiencies in implementing projects from months to days. In particular, the fact that the service takes on board large volumes of data across multiple data sources for several hundred thousand portfolios across several million investors with near-zero latency and project cycles of two to three weeks is very impressive.
“StreamBase’s infrastructure has eliminated the previous need for our engineers to be bogged down in low-level plumbing,” says John Leslie, chief technology officer at WSOD. “In the past, when a client requested a new feature, such as a new data stream for their retail investor sites, it could have taken months to add. Clearly, this needed to change because clients want these new capabilities immediately. With StreamBase’s speed, scalability and value, we have scaled back our custom-coded application development, and are delivering on our vision of using innovative technology to bring value to our clients.”
