Incentage - Changing the Context from Advisor to Trader Enabling Growth at Lower Cost

Clariden Bank (www.clariden.ch) is one of the leading private banks of Switzerland. It operates independently within the CREDIT SUISSE GROUP. Clariden Bank offers its clients investment services in an environment of security and discretion, which are trimmed towards maximum quality and performance. These customized and high-standing services are designed for an extremely demanding and international clientele.

The Problem

As a Private Bank, Clariden`s core business is clearly client driven. The number of client transactions such as stock market transactions on various places involving forex deals and pure forex transactions increased continuously. There are several reasons for the growing volume. The successful implementation of OTMS, the in-house order system from IBM, made the order flow of market transactions and traditional back-office transactions (dividend payments with forex involved, small payment orders, cash balancing) transparent. Advisors were able to further increase the quality of the customer service and manage their assets more actively while the bank was able to increase the number of clients. The requirement was to be able to handle a larger number of smaller trades without increasing operational costs and risk. Consistency and high quality must be guaranteed even for peak volumes. The traders using the Spearhead position keeping system have to be alerted immediately when a transaction would be rejected due to different philosophies of the involved applications. The details of such a rejected transaction must be presented at the trader´s screen. In order to satisfy audit requirements, Incentage needs to provide reports about the history of processed and rejected trades.

The Solution

Changing the context of the trade information from the advisor´s view to the trader´s view is not as easy as it sounds. Different business philosophies surface when analyzing the meaning of trade attributes. Highly sophisticated truth tables and boolean expressions deal with cross rates that might need to be inverted, trades that might have to be split and margins that need to be calculated. The Java based Incentage Middleware Suite (IMS) is highly business oriented and thus provides the flexibility needed to address these issues. Incentage´s RulesStudio permitted to efficiently generate the business logic to create spots, outrights and forward swaps in Spearhead, the target treasury system. To control operational risk, Incentage allows supervision on three levels. The technical level protocols any infrastructure issues and recovery actions taken by IMS. The content level protocols fingerprints of the trades in the SQL Server reporting database. The third process level allows supervising the exception handling activities.

"We decided to use Incentage because it provides a robust and convenient interface with very little effort required on our side."

Marcel Weidinger, Risk Manager Treasury at Clariden Bank

Background

The central requirement of Clariden Bank is that it can focus on the efficient management of its core activities while keeping operational risk is under control. Excellent interface management makes this possible.

Incentage management console

The above picture shows the management console that allows configuring different views of the information flow. Depending on the user´s permissions, it is possible to supervise and control the information flow from various computers in the network. The management console is communicating via TCP/IP with the Incentage components running somewhere in the network on a server. Incentage fully supports alternative live keeping systems such as IBM´s Tivoli. The involved applications OTMS and Spearhead are based on proprietary message syntax and semantics. Rules have been specified within Incentage to ensure that the messages are correctly converted, transforming not only the structure but also the meaning of the information. Incentages´ heavy investment into features such as ease of navigation and automatic generation of documentation of the conversion rules has paid off in projects such as this. As well as facilitating the intuitive entry of rules, the software provides navigation, documentation and automatic comparison of versions of the rules.