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March 2008: Message Automation's Dr. Christian Nentwich to appear on panel session at CORE08, the Credit Derivatives Operations and Risk Efficiency conference.
Message Automation's Strategy Director, Christian Nentwich will appear as a panel member at CORE '08, the leading Credit Derivatives Operations and Risk Efficiency conference. The conference is held on 13th March at One Great George Street in Westminster. The panel session is at 14.15. The subject will be:
Documentation – what and where are the key issues and challenges; does FPML have limits; and can complex products ever benefit from standardised templates?
We believe the subject is highly relevant as industry participants struggle to address the backlogs and inefficiencies in the OTC Derivatives arena. To attend the conference or find out more, Register here
January 2008: Message Automation hosts panel session at Finexpo City Technology Strategies
More than 60 industry practitioners attended Message Automation's panel discussion at Finexpo. The expo, held at The Brewery Chiswell Street, on 30th January 2008 was well attended and other exhibitors included fellow derivatives solution providers.
A number of recent market initiatives will impact the post trade landscape for OTC Derivatives in 2008. These include DTCC Trade Warehouse, CLS cashflow settlement, TriResolve portfolio reconciliation, Markit's acquisition of Swapswire. The panel provided their views on the likely impact of these. Questions focussed on the pressing issues of trade confrimation backlogs and the difficulties surrounding collateral management.
The highly experienced industry panel consisted of
January 2008: Three further implementations of Message Automation products go-live in major financial institutions.
Message Automation is delighted to announce that the fourth quarter of 2007 saw the successful completion of a further three projects to implement its derivatives processing software. The projects were each completed on time on budget in very rapid timescales.
One of these, at Fidelity Investments in the U.S.A. saw Message Automation's Translator and Validator products installed in tandem. The two products were implemented to assist Fidelity, one of the worlds largest investment managers, with its adoption of Financial Products Markup Language (FpML) for internal messaging. The entire project was completed in just 13 weeks.
Another project, at a major Swiss investment bank, was the first implementation of Validator for use in verifying complex trades. The Exotics & Hybrids Middle Office are now using Validator to check the consistency of trade capture for highly complex structured products against their own internal business rules.
The final success came at long standing customer RBS Financial Markets. The use of Translator was extended once again to cover linking to the Bank's new derivatives confirmation document generation application. The whole range of equity derivative products was covered by the project, where Translator was used to extract trades from the front office and create the internal standard XML messages for tranamission downstream.
November 2007: The Times shows University College London rising into the top ten unversities worldwide.
Message Automation holds the exclusive worldwide licence to exploit the patent underlying our Validator Software. The patent arose from research undertaken at UCL by Message Automation's Dr Christian Nentwich, and Professor Anthony Finkelstein, who represents the University on the company's Board.
The rankings are based on a number of criteria, and confirm UCL's research pedigree. Details in the The Times Online.
November 2007: B.I.S.Basle Semi-annual OTC derivatives statistics show continued strong growth in volumes and market values in first half of 2007
The Bank for International Settelments relased its semi-annual market statisitics report for OTC Derivatives. This showed year-on-year growth across all assets classes in both nominal outstandings and gross market value. Particularly strong areas were Equity Derivatives (up 66% from June '06) and Multi-name Credit Default Swaps (up 183%). The statistics refer to June 2007, even before the credit crunch saw volumes soaring again. The aggregate market value of OTCs was up to over $11 trillion. Full details here.October 2007: Message Automation enables banks to grow OTC derivatives revenue with launch of Proactive Derivatives
Details in the press release.July 2007: Message Automation to exhibit at SIBOS 2007 in Boston
Message Automation will be present at SIBOS 2007 - visit us on stand E39 to talk about your OTC Derivatives processing requirements.July 2007: City Networks to make strategic investment in OTC derivatives specialist Message Automation
City Networks announced today their intention to invest in Message Automation, the London-based derivatives processing specialist. The two companies have agreed terms for City Networks to acquire a significant minority stake in Message Automation. At the same time, both companies have signed a partnership agreement that enables City Networks to add extensive derivatives processing to their business solutions.Under this new partnership agreement, City Networks will be able to offer their 500+ global customers Message Automation's matching and reconciliation technology, which is based on FpML (Financial products Markup Language), the industry standard protocol for OTC derivatives products.
"Given the continued growth in the use of OTC derivatives and the fact that there is still a high level of manual processing involved", explains Richard Hill, City Networks' CEO, "most financial firms experience high error rates and remain exposed to significant risks and losses. Automating these complex trades is not easy and whilst we already had some capability in this area, we wanted to provide our customers with deeper functionality that supported all derivatives processing regardless of asset class. We are confident that with Message Automation's expertise in this area, our Proactive process management software will be positioned at the forefront of derivatives processing."
Commenting on the alliance, Hugh Daly, CEO of Message Automation said, "Our proven capabilities in the derivatives market provide a natural fit with City Networks' established and global customer base. The investment will allow us to grow our business to meet the demand we are encountering in the market. For many organisations, the OTC Derivatives post trade problem is a long way from being fixed and this is a powerful alliance which will go a long way to resolving this problem".
March 2007: Two more projects utilising Message Automation's Translator solution go live at The Royal Bank of Scotland
Translator, which has been in use at RBS for three years, is used to create FpML-based messages from a wide variety of asset classes traded by the RBS Equity Derivatives team. In the latest project to go live, Equity Linked Notes from the Structured Notes desk are taken from the front office system and published by Translator into their information hub using RBS.s own XML language (based on FpML). From the information hub, these trades are seamlessly passed downstream to back office (Calypso) and risk systems, positioning the bank for significant growth in this area during 2007.Translator helps RBS comply with the FSA.s Transaction Reporting System (TRS). On a scheduled daily basis, Translator interrogates RBS.s Equity Derivatives front office system and creates an extract file in XML format in line with the guidelines stipulated by the FSA. This XML document, combined with similar information from the other front office derivatives systems, is transmitted directly to the FSA enabling RBS to fully comply with the requirement, with minimum manual intervention, regardless of transaction volumes.
Both of these projects were completed without coding using Translator's graphical interface, which enables even complex FpML messages to be easily understood and mapped. When the rules change and new versions are published Translator can automatically update the schemas without losing the existing mapping or amending cumbersome scripts or XSLT, significantly reducing the maintenance overhead normally associated with upgrades.
January 2007: Message Automation to exhibit at FinExpo 2007
Details on the FinExpo web site.