Managing Consultant Justin Richards is leading a major project at one of our clients which borders on the positively epic.

The system we’re developing will handle every derivative trade across multiple asset classes, and every traded loan in the bank, as well as many of the cash trades.
At any one time this can be more than 3 million trades per day, with monitoring of every significant event in the lifecycle of a trade: amendments, confirmations, payments, cancellations and maturities.
The objective of the project is to achieve a significant reduction in regulatory capital. To achieve this our client has to convince the regulators that…

• Their advanced models for the calculation of future exposures are correct
• That they have control of the data that is input to the risk engines, which means it’s a complete data set and correctly classified.

One added benefit of the system is that by running the RWA calculation more frequently the Bank can manage the RWA cash buffer more efficiently and achieve significant savings in funding costs.

The system collects derivative trade data directly from the Front Office systems, validates it, enriches it and transforms it, before sending it down to the risk engines, all in STP-mode. The system is made aware of the numbers of trades expected by the risk engines by “learning” the content of the feeds.

The system maintains a repository of all the open trades in the bank for the duration of their life. In the case of Interest Swaps that can be as long as 30 years. This helps satisfy the data control element of the regulations. The data publication mechanism creates a map of the data that is relevant for the business day (that which is aligned with the daily P&L), and hands this map over to the Risk Engines, so that they can “pull” the data from the repository as and when they need it.” 

Justin Richards

Rule Financial is on course to smash its 2007
target by taking turnover past the £18m mark, 
as the company’s growth rate soars in excess of
80%, it was announced recently.

At Rule’s regular half-yearly evening meeting hosted in the elegant surroundings of the National Liberal Club at 1, Whitehall Place, CEO and founder Marcus Rule presented figures confirming that the company has added 42 new permanent staff in the last six months alone, thanks to buoyant City trading and increasing recognition of Rule Financial’s ability to service the needs of its blue chip client portfolio.

“Despite the occasional readjustment, business is generally booming in the Square Mile, which gives us the chance to show just how good we are.” explained Marcus. “We’ve got the best people on board, and we’re adding more of them each month. The only barrier to further growth is finding people of the right quality.”

Following the opening presentation, Management Consultant Rachel Andrew from Rule’s Technical Consulting division, spoke on how the company is seeking to position itself as the “Employer of Choice” among the higher echelons of banking consultancy.  She emphasised that a definition of success was when the best clients wanted you to work for them, and the best brains wanted to work for you. Rachel also spoke about the company’s growing contingent of Russian consultants, many now with families in the UK, who constitute Rule’s “Russian Club” (See news story)

Other presentations were given by Head of Business Consulting Dr. Michael Gordon, who summed up his first 100 days at Rule with  a “6P” mnemonic covering People, Processes, Propositions, Promotion, Performance and Predictions, and a Rule Green Team of David Little and Zoë Condon who outlined plans to achieve Carbon Neutrality by 2008, to the booming strains of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Heady stuff.

                       Hullo everybody . My name is Hal.