Case Study
Our client is a major investment bank that publishes over 4000 benchmarks and bespoke strategies. They were struggling with a labor-intensive reporting processes that were slow, inaccurate and difficult to scale. We built an automated dashboard tailored in line with client’s needs to make reporting far faster and more efficient, allowing both standard and custom reports to be created, configured and shared more quickly than ever before – benefiting both the bank and its clients.
The Challenge
Position reports specifying strategies’ historical constituents were once a by-product of reconciling trading positions for structuring and trading teams. Nowadays, they are a prerequisite for deals with clients, who need to verify back-tests and assess risk exposure under many different scenarios. Our client was a major investment bank whose clients needed a range of customized reports to help them carry out stress testing and scenario analysis. The bank was seeing strong demand for both standard and bespoke reports. If they could meet this need, they could give their own business a boost. Unfortunately, generating reports depended on a tedious manual procedure based on spreadsheets. The process could not scale to peaks in demand, or shorten time to market. The problem worsened as clients explored ever more complex investment strategies. The current approach was unsustainable – and it was holding back expansion. So the bank came to us for a way forward
Our Solution
We drew on our technology expertise and financial services experience to create an automated, scalable, modular dashboard for generating reports. The initial blueprint was built on Excel VBA, then migrated to a Python-based dashboard with a simple, clear user interface (UI). The bank can use predefined queries to run standard reports, end-of-day level reports and position reports, while bespoke reports can be set up and configured through the UI. The dashboard allows reports to be generated automatically at preset times, in line with the bank’s publishing schedule. Reports can be delivered to multiple recipients via email or FTP. The last piece of the puzzle was accommodate strategies created outside the system. To solve this problem, we developed a specialized interface in Python that imports external strategies and integrates them into the dashboard along with all the others.
Benefits Achieved
Using the new system, the bank can deliver over 1500 reports on a daily basis without any human intervention. This represents a 400% year-onyear increase in the volume of reports. The dashboard is a major advantage to clients considering investments in cross-asset riskpremia strategies, who need comprehensive position-level reports to identify and assess sources of market, credit, liquidity or operational risk. These reports also support clients’ internal risk-management processes via VAR analyses and mandatory regulatory reporting. The marketing competence of the bank’s structuring and trading teams has been significantly enhanced. They can now offer a broader range of services, and also achieve a faster time to market. The onboarding time for standard reports is now just three hours, and the new delivery modes mean that reports reach clients faster than ever before. The bank now has a single platform that covers most of their reporting requirements and is stable, robust, efficient and scalable. Overall, they have a solid basis on which to grow their investment strategy business.