Trade capture, risk reporting and middle office operational support

Challenges

The project addressed a number of challenges:

• Man decided to set up a secondary market to trade in their own underlying products. This allowed them to provide their customers with greater trading flexibility — avoiding the usual lock-in periods and restricted dealing calendars offered by traditional funds in the primary market.
• The secondary market service was to be launched in Switzerland and required approval by the Swiss regulator, including the provision of adequate systems to support the running of the market. A deadline was set for the launch (and regulatory approval) and there were only four months available to deliver the system.
• This needed to provide trade capture integration with back office share registry and accounting systems, position and risk reporting.
• The solution also needed to integrate with the MI Trade e-commerce website and was the first project to be built according to Man’s new enterprise architecture standards.

Key Benefits

• Man selected Digiterre to deliver the solution because they felt that resource constraints meant that their internal teams would not be able meet the challenging timescales.
• In addition the solution required using a leading edge technical architecture with which their inhouse teams were not yet familiar, putting additional pressure on the timescales.
• The system and Digiterre’s presence as a strategic delivery partner enabled Man to respond quickly to changing business priorities.
• The system resulted in Man winning the “Best use of business-to-business e-commerce” category at the Financial Sector Technology Awards.