RowIT is a boutique London based IT consultancy providing trading platform solutions to the investment banking sector.
Their small team have worked within Europe and Asia and over the past 15 years have built an unchallenged expertise in the Murex platform.
See below for a selection of our past projects.
Commerzbank
Precious Metals Integration
The client had 2 Murex implementations. One used by Luxembourg for its precious metals business and one by the commodities users throughout the rest of the world (global installation). They wanted to combine the two.
RowIT provided the functional expertise to deliver on the objective. Focused on enhancing the global installation to provide all the functionality provided by the Luxembourg installation. They then designed, tested and produced a detailed migration plan to allow the movement of all positions from one system to the other and allow the second Murex instance be decommissioned.
Commerzbank
Performance Test Pack
To design and build a performance test pack to allow a full performance test. Test consisted of 4 areas:
We designed, built, documented and executed this for the client for a fixed price.
Execution of the test highlighted numerous issues that were resolved during the project. The final result was that on the Monday morning after each of the major go-lives the system performed as expected.
Mizuho International
Greenfield Implementation
The client had number of Credit Default Swaps and Convertible Bond traders who were heavily dependent on spreadsheets. The business had decide more controls were needed and to implement Murex.
We started on this project just after the decision had been made to go with Murex. We helped in the technical and business configuration of the system. Integration of the Monis Convertible Bond pricing library, using the parallel FlexAPI and configuration of the system for both the Equity Convertible Bond traders and the Credit traders.
Significant work was undertaken to produce Flash P&L for the Front Office, a key control that had been missing and production of stress testing reports for the Risk Department.
Commerzbank
Sybase and Patch Upgrade
The client was on a very old release of Sybase and had multiple patches of Murex in production and wanted to upgrade from Sybase 12.5 to 15.7 and upgrade to a later Murex binary.
We provided a team to manage the entire project for the client including: configuration, testing, management of the infrastructure teams, go-live planning and implementation for a fixed price. Significant obstacles were faced due to the Sybase change and we utilised our contacts within both Sybase and Murex support teams to resolve these issues in a timely fashion. Project went live to schedule and on go-live performance and functional aspects were as anticipated.
Large European Bank
Reuters OpenDacs
Client had identified that they had significant potential exchange fee liabilities dues to excessive access to market data by the 100+ realtime users. The decision was made to implement Murex Reuters OpenDacs module and we provided a fixed price quote to design, test, implement and ensure compliance to licence agreements.
The project involved the functional, performance and stability testing of Module, including fixing of a number of critical bugs. We then designed a roll-out plan to minimise the impact on the users.
Roll-out involved initially enabling the module but allowing full access to all exchanges and gathering data on which users were accessing which exchange. Then after a short period of time users were informed of which exchanges they were not accessing and their access to those exchanges removed.
A process was then put in place to remove access on a quarterly basis from users who had not accessed an exchange to ensure costs were kept under control. In addition we implemented a solution to provided 20min delayed dataset to users. This allowed users who did not need live prices to avoid costly exchange fees.
Large European Bank
Sun Sparc to Intel x86 Migration.
We undertook the initial analysis and proof of concept for moving the clients Murex platform from Sparc to x86. The driver for the project was the exceptional cost savings that could be achieved (payback period was measured in months not years) and in addition performance gains were expected.
The bank was using a cluster of Sparc M5000 machines, and we proposed a combination of Sun X4800 and Sun X2-2 servers. The subsequent implementation realised both the cost and performance gains that our proof of concept had predicted.
Commerzbank
Risk Platform Integration
Client had been running 2 separate implementations of Murex. One was managed by Front Office IT and the other by Risk IT. Responsibility for the risk platform had been passed from Risk IT to the Front Office IT team
The project involved migrating the Risk instance from the Risk IT infrastructure on the Front Office IT infrastructure. The objective was to ensure that any report or interface could be run on either system, and that they shared common source code and release processes. This project involved extensive re-engineering of the scheduling system, Perl and Bash script trees.
The end result was a simplification of the IT infrastructure and reduced support costs to the bank – especially when major projects were undertaken.