04:03 PM
Risk Newsflashes
Abbey Financial Markets Picks Summit Systems for Credit Derivatives, Front-to-Back Operations
Abbey Financial Markets chose Summit Systems to handle all of its credit derivatives trades from booking to operations.
The purchase is part of a restructuring program that is designed to improve straight-through processing (STP) and achieve efficiencies across the business. In addition to supporting existing non-credit risk products, Summit will cover instruments such as default swaps, baskets and indexed trades.
Abbey has been a customer of Summit since 1987, but over the past few years, its credit-derivatives business has grown in volume and complexity. By the end of 2003, the range of business had outgrown the system. Rather than rewrite the complete systems, Abbey decided to explore external suppliers, including Summit.
"Until recently, no vendor could provide us with the functionality we required. Six months ago, Summit launched version 3.5, and this release has narrowed the gap," states Steve White, IT client manager at Abbey, in the release. "Summit was also the natural choice to fit into our current infrastructure and work with our own APIs [application programming interfaces]," further states White in the release.
Summit will integrate well with Abbey's own models for exotics and structured trades processing that includes RPI options, reverse floaters and callable range accrual notes. "Credit derivatives are a very active and evolving market and Summit will give us the power to react more quickly in the handling of larger volumes and growing complexity," states White in the release.