The Challenge
BNP Paribas’ Fixed Interest Derivatives team had to deliver a new, fully integrated and high performance system to support the bank’s business operation. Derivatives are extremely complex financial instruments, with many terms, options, contract details and logic that must be embedded within them. Because mistakes can cost millions of Euros, the need to keep risk to a minimum is vitally important.
Before using ETL Solutions’ software, the team had been using XSLT to handcraft the transformations. This initially met the bank’s need for speed but as time progressed, dealing with more challenging transformations became increasingly resource-intensive. Maintenance and handovers were particularly difficult as complexity increased. The XSLT became “a slag heap of code” which could not be easily read by anyone other than the original developers. The possibility of mistakes was thus significantly magnified.
The Solution
The bank sought an alternative and evaluated a number of potential solutions. The team chose to proceed with ETL Solutions after evaluating our Transformation Manager software. We provided software training and ten days of consulting to the BNP Paribas team of analysts and developers. This provided a quick ramp-up period, enabling the client’s team to deliver a successful solution within three months.
BNP Paribas are very pleased with Transformation Manager and have used it for XML to XML transformations involving real time front office to back office interfaces, plus bulk XML extracts for archiving and reconciliation.Our software’s architectural flexibility enables the same logic and transformations to be deployed in a batch solution (for archiving and reconciliation), as well as a real-time workflow process connecting to a third-party Murex engine.BNP Paribas has also now developed a highly maintainable suite of transformation logic that can change with the business.
According to Arnaud Daeschner, the Team Lead, the results have been extremely positive. Since the initial project, Transformation Manager has been used across a range of projects by the Fixed Interest IT team.
“We’ve cut a six-month project down to three months using Transformation Manager. Performance of the code is on a par with hand-coded solutions, so we get a sophisticated product that is easy to work with and maintain AND gives us great performance. We’re very confident with the solution that Transformation Manager provides.” Arnaud Daeschner, BNP Paribas
