WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Transcription

1 Wallstreet Suite Comprehensive, cross-asset investment and debt management solutions for financial institutions and corporations FACT SHEET: WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Wallstreet Suite provides robust business functionality on a modern, scalable, extensible technology framework that is quick and safe to extend, as well as easy to maintain. This gives Wallstreet Suite a unique advantage of being able to constantly adapt and augment its business functionality by incorporating new technology as needed, seamlessly alongside other more mature technologies to keep up with ever-changing market requirements. Business Challenges When selecting the best technology for their business needs, organizations face the challenge of accommodating the flexibility of a desktop spreadsheet, the throughput handling of a bank back-office system, and the auditing capability of an accounting application. Typical usage patterns require well-defined architecture that supports increasing transaction volumes and concurrent user counts, complex processing rules and transactions that are always changing and advancing. Furthermore, businesses must adapt to ever-advancing technology and IT infrastructure with minimal disruption to the core business. This is not aided by the fact that organizations often use a number of systems with varying technologies, which not only require support and functional development over time, but also lead to increased costs due to the systems being provided by different vendors. From a vendor perspective, such requirements pose challenges as well. Over time, such development typically forces vendors to compromise architectural integrity in favour of functional development in order to meet delivery commitments. Software vendors therefore need to maintain the ability to evolve the underlying technology and infrastructure, thus allowing them to stay current, whilst still continually expanding and adapting business functionality. Edition 1 PAGE 1 OF 8

2 Key Features Supported technology Client Operating system Windows Vista Windows 2003 Windows 2000 Windows XP Client Browser IE 6.x and 7.x Firefox 2.x Java Development Kit Sun JDK HP JDK Server Operating system Solaris 10 HP-UX Windows 2003 RedHat Linux Server Application Server Tomcat BEA Weblogic IBM Websphere Web Server IIS 6.x Apache 2.x Message Bus IBM WebSphere MQ Active MQ Architecture The architecture of Wallstreet Suite allows for encapsulation of the infrastructure components in an operating system, technology or vendor-agnostic manner. This minimizes the dependency of the system on any one vendor or technology. Adding support for new RDBMS (eg DB2) or Application Servers (WebSphere, WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss) is greatly simplified by this approach and allows the application to evolve, conforming to increasingly new industry-standard infrastructure, without having to rewrite core business logic. The business logic is split into real time daemonss and horizontally scalable Business Services interacting through an Enterprise Service Bus. The daemonss can be started and stopped independent of what is required by the end users. This means that daemonss that are not required doesn t have to be started and thus saves computation power. They are a core part of the true real-time capability that is one of Wallstreet Suite s strengths. Real-time Services A large number of Wallstreet Suite s business processes are dependent on the availability of real-time information. Examples of these business processes are: Transaction monitoring Position monitoring Limit monitoring Rates import Wallstreet Suite provides real-time information to end users via these services. For example, the Treasury Monitor updates the NPV and other key figures in real-time, for each update from the price feed or each new deal added in the Front Office. This enables end users to base business decisions on current market data and the downstream effects of changing market conditions on end users portfolio positions and limits. The limits are also updated in real-time, thus allowing the user always to see positions accordingly. From a technical perspective these real time processes are run on the Wallstreet Suite application server, to take advantage of additional computational power of those systems (more memory, more CPUs, faster CPUs) compared to what is available on end users desktops. RDBMS Oracle MS SQL Sybase PAGE OF 8 Edition 1

3 Enterprise Service Bus An open industry-standard Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) a core part of the Wallstreet Suite s architecture. It makes the Wallstreet Suite scalable, allows for modular delivery of software components, horizontal scalability and load balancing, and also simplifies challenges. Each business service in the Wallstreet Suite is implemented in such a way that one or more examples of the service can be launched. This allows for horizontal scaling of the application s business functionality. Examples or such services include: Front Office Pricing Settlement Netting Cut-off Time Processing Internal Deal Mirroring Document Manager SWIFT Adapter SWIFT FIN generation SWIFT FIN matching The fact that these business services are designed to communicate through the ESB allows the client to scale the architecture horizontally. A horizontally scalable architecture allows clients to manage increased volume/concurrent usage requirements by adding additional hardware (e.g. buying more boxes) rather than attempting to scale vertically (e.g. by investing in a very expensive, very high-powered single server). After adding the new hardware, additional instances of the same business services can be run on the new server. The ESB will manage the distribution of messages to the services running on both the old or new servers, thus increasing the overall throughput of the application. In addition, the end users see a fault tolerant system, as issues on one of the servers may appear only as degradation in performance (depending on the load), and not a complete outage. Administrator Tools Wallstreet Suite also contains various tools to make life easier for the system administrator. These include reports for database statistics as well as data integrity checking and clean up tools that removes unused data. Two of the most important tools for the system administrator are the Process Monitor and the Data Transfer Tool. Process Monitor Process Monitor is a Wallstreet Suite management system with which you can monitor daemonss as well as starting and stopping them. The monitor knows about the dependencies between the daemonss, so if a daemon needs another to run, it will automatically be started. The Process Monitor includes a user friendly interface. End users can themselves use this interface to manage the daemonss if they need to, without requiring a deep system knowledge. This can be especially helpful in test and development environments at the customer s site as it allows the end users to have control over these environments. Data Transfer Tool The Data Transfer Tool is allows the transfer of data from one database to another with the possibility of storing the data in XML files as an intermediate step. Typically you would use this to transfer selected data from the live system to the test system. It can work with single tables or with objects. The objects know the dependencies between tables. This lets you copy complete and consistent data as all dependent tables and related data are copied at the same time. You can extract just a sub-set of the data or all data within an object. With this tool you can either just copy data out of the system or you can complete remove the data from the source system. It can also be used either to replace the existing data or to update duplicate records in the destination system. Edition 1 PAGE OF 8

4 Interfaces Wallstreet Suite is delivered with a number of standard and additional interfaces for simple connectivity to external systems. This means that it is simple to plug the system into business processes that go beyond the system, the department, and even the enterprise. Standard Interfaces Reuters SWIFT SAP RiskMetrics Misys Confirmation Matching Service AR/AP Interface Reuters Wallstreet Suite offers two different interfaces to Reuters: Real-time interface for market information Reuters Dealing 3000 The real-time interface provides real-time market information from models such as SSL4 and Reuters Market Data System (RDMS). Wallstreet Suite facilitates real-time position monitoring through the constant pushing of k-f updates and hence instantly calculates the market value of each transaction. The Reuters Dealing 3000 link is used to transfer foreign exchange and money market deals from the Dealing 3000 system and its Ticket Output Feed to Wallstreet Suite. The link comprises a communications module as well as a data conversion and storage module. The interface allows for connectivity over a network connection and comes complete with mapping for a working out-of-thebox solution. The communications module monitors the Dealing 3000 port, passing on new deals to the data and storage module, as and when they become available. The data conversion and storage module then maps the deal details into Wallstreet Suite s transaction fields and stores the transactions in the database. Transaction details that cannot be extracted from Dealing for example the portfolio and initial state of transaction - can be defined in a configuration file. SWIFT Wallstreet Suite provides certified SWIFT connectivity for SWIFT members and other non-member organizations connecting through models such as Treasury Counterparties (TRCO), MA-CUGs or SWIFT Score. Wallstreet Suite uses the latest SWIFT technology to support a range of connection methods including file transfer, MQSA/MQHA, CASmf and Remote API Host Adapter (RAHA). Through SWIFTNet a number of messages can be sent. This enables payment instructions to be delivered to banks both in FIN format as well as FileAct protocol. PAGE OF 8 Edition 1

5 With a FileAct message many different international and national payment formats can be used as agreed by the banks and their clients. The payment export status report enables tracking of the export status on each individual payment transaction. Wallstreet Suite links each exported transaction with the acknowledgement returned by the bank. In addition, bank statements can be downloaded for a timely update of bank balances. Wallstreet Suite also supports SWIFT Accord for confirmation matching. MT300, 305, 320, 330, 340, 341, 362 and 392 confirmation messages can be sent via SWIFTNet to the counterparty. SWIFT Accord will use some of these messages for matching. Wallstreet Suite automatically reads the matching result and update the matching status in the system and therefore the user has only to deal with the unmatched exceptions. The SWIFT communication logged in Wallstreet Suite offers a detailed communication status such as success, failure and reason for failure, allowing the user to take proper action based on the log report in case of any problems. Through the Wallstreet Suite-wide event notification one can also obtain an automatic pop-up or displaying the communication status. SAP Wallstreet Suite s accounting solution provides a standard built-in ERP interface which allows accounting data to be exported to clients general ledger systems. Additionally, when interfacing SAP-FI, the ERP interface provides comprehensive integration based on on-line communication with SAP. This ensures complete consistency of data between the accounting solution and SAP GL. The interface also enables communication with multiple parallel physical SAP systems. RiskMetrics Wallstreet Suite uses three standard interfaces to exchange data with RiskMetrics: RiskMetrics volatility data import RiskManager Interfaces (RMI) CreditManager Interface (CMI) Correlation and volatility data can be feed from RiskMetrics to support the calculation of parametric Value-at-Risk in Wallstreet Suite. To get data to Wallstreet Suite from RiskMetrics, the data import in Wallstreet Suite uses the *.dcf, *.mvf and *.mcf files available from the RiskMetrics ftp server, or from a compatible file. For customers with advanced Value-at-Risk (VaR) requirements, we recommend the use of the RiskManager from RiskMetrics. RiskManager supports the calculation of VaR through both Monte Carlo and Historic simulations. Therefore we have built a standard interface, RMI, to export the Wallstreet Suite position information in the RML format, which is the XML-based format introduced by RiskMetrics to describe positions. The CMI enables the export of obligors and exposures both transactions and positions information from Wallstreet Suite to CreditManager thereby allowing the user to quantify credit risk of traditional credit products, fixed income instruments and market-driven instruments, subject to changes in credit rating. Furthermore CreditManager allows the linkage of all subsidiaries to their parent companies, through the use of client and parent fields respectively, thus permitting the user to determine who the true obligor is. CMI exports information from Wallstreet Suite using the same RML format file as RMI. The out of the box standard mapping of fields between SAP and Wallstreet Suite s accounting functionality adds to the benefits offered by the interface as does the possibility of customizing the default mapping. A set of user tools also exist which lets the user define mapping values between the accounting functionality and SAP, and offer the possibility of exporting individual accounting entries or summarized periodic balance movements. Technically, the communication with SAP can be configured using SAP-XI or SAP Business Connector integration technologies. Both methods are implemented internally as a set of calls using standard SAP APIs (BAPIs, RFCs, IDOCs). Edition 1 PAGE OF 8

6 Misys Confirmation Matching Service Misys CMS is a Confirmation Matching Service that helps to reduce operational risk and streamline the trade confirmation process. It also offers a number of post-trade services including netting, standing settlement instructions and 3rd party notifications, allowing customers to automate multiple activities on a single platform. The Misys CMS interface allows the export transaction confirmations in MT300 and 320 format and import the returning confirmation files from Misys. The following instruments are supported: FX spot, FX forward, FX swap, deposits and loans. AP/AR Interface Wallstreet Suite offers different ways to import AR/AP data and other payment information from ERP systems and other systems. The most common method is to import the data in a flat file, but it is also possible to import the data in a XML format. Wallstreet informs the client which data is mandatory and which data is optional for the interface. It is then easy to extract the data from the source in the desired format. The user is then able to connect the source system with Wallstreet Suite via file transfer or use web services to connect directly. Mapping and Additional Interfaces Wallstreet Suite contains tools for mapping data to and from external formats and for communication with third parties. This makes the system extremely flexible and as a result it can support any requirement for interfacing beyond that which is delivered as standard with Wallstreet Suite. Furthermore, Wallstreet has a large repository of previously developed interfaces as well as the necessary processes in place to standardize them. There also exists an extensive portfolio of supporting mechanisms to enable interfacing to other systems. PAGE OF 8 Edition 1

7 Mapping Wallstreet Suite can map relevant data into any existing file format. Wallstreet Suite provides standardized messages which help streamline the implementation process, as well as offering the flexibility of customizing messages to the user s needs. The system is particularly useful for payment and cash management and thus comes pre-configured with many standardized sample messages for SWIFT MT, ISO 20022, Edifact, BAI and other formats. The main interfacing tool for Wallstreet Suite s cash management solution is the highly powerful XML-based interchange mechanism. For all incoming and outgoing communications to bank systems or other systems within the organizations such as ERP, the interchange mechanism lets the user custom-build the XML specifications that interpret and validate incoming files or build and validate outgoing files. These files are then linked to internal functionality such as payment release or bank transaction import via an interchange. The interchange also defines the various communication protocols, signatures and encryptions mechanisms, aggregation methods, etc. When the functionality is initiated, the appropriate interchange is used to load or export the information either manually or automatically via the task scheduler jobs. ComKIT ComKIT is a programming toolkit which provides an application programming interface (API) to Wallstreet Suite. Using ComKIT, you can access Wallstreet Suite functionality through the API by writing your own client and by-passing Wallstreet Suite s graphical user interface (GUI). ComKIT makes importing transactions easy since it uses the same underlying software as the transaction manager GUI to enter transactions. Thus the calls the user makes in ComKIT map directly onto the operations carried out in transaction manager to enter a deal correctly. The user can develop a ComKIT client through either Python or Java support classes. ComKIT consists of the following services, with each one providing access to a different area of Wallstreet Suite functionality: Static Data service Transaction service Call Money service Settlement service Position service Performance service Examples of interfaces made using the interface tools: Payment and Account Balances ABN-AMRO BANK OF AMERICA Citi Bank Deutsche Bank Lloyds Bank NatWest SEB UBS Confirmations DEN NORSKE BANK BA CREDITANSTALT VIENA OASYS Custody Houses BoNY SEB Sweden s VPC Transaction Links Reuters Triarch Bloomberg EBS (DekaBank) Swedish Central Bank APK State-Street Accounting links Oracle Financial Sun Accounts JD Edwards In-house developed GL systems Edition 1 PAGE OF 8

8 Business Challenge Technology which adapts to constant changes in market requirements Technology with a scale to manage increased transaction volumes Build and maintain multiple interfaces to several other systems Wallstreet Suite Solution With Wallstreet Suite you don t need to choose between technology and functionality. Wallstreet Suite has always kept up with the technological changes and uses the most modern technology to develop the best and most flexible functionality. Wallstreet Suite uses Enterprise Service Architecture which allows you to add extra servers as the volume goes up, thus you don t see any decrease in performance with higher volume. Wallstreet Suite comes with most of the required interfaces as standard interfaces that can be used out of the box with few adjustments. Further flexible tools and APIs enable you to build any interface not available as standard with ease and minimum effort as part of the implementation project Wall Street Systems Delaware, Inc. All rights reserved. CONTACT US North America HQ [email protected] Europe HQ +44 (0) Asia HQ Wall Street Systems Empowering Treasury, Trading and Settlement Edition 1 PAGE 4 OF 4