Vol 6 No 20
CONNECTIVITY
CBA Deploys eGlobal Trader for FX, MM
SYDNEY--Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has gone live with SunGard Trading Systems’ eGlobalTrader (eGT), a browser-based dealer distribution solution, for front-office deal capture in foreign exchange (FX) and money markets, officials said last week.
The solution was launched Dec. 6, 2002, at the bank’s Sydney headquarters, with Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth coming on simultaneously, says Geoff Kelly, CBA’s general manager of business systems in the bank’s Institutional and Business Services Division. Melbourne should be switched on by mid-April, Kelly says.
CBA uses eGT for pricing, capturing and processing its customers’ FX transactions, including spot, forward, swaps, FX extension/pre-deliveries and multi-currency money market (loans and deposits) transactions.
Approximately 92 sales traders currently use eGT, in addition to the 56 that were using the Microsoft Windows desktop version of SunGard Trading Systems’ Global Trader, which is used by CBA’s position-taking dealers who interact with other banks, Kelly says. The sales traders now use eGT, which uses HTTPS and NetBIOS protocols over TCP/IP.
The bank chose to deploy eGT in intranet fashion to assist in extending risk across assets and to take advantage of the cost savings inherent in moving away from a distributed core application to one that affords access to the application "from any position in the room," Kelly says. The risk extension, or "cover mode," is particular to eGT and "not only covers the FX risk, but also mitigates the US dollar interest-rate risk that can arise for transactions greater than spot value. This new cover mode effectively locks in the P&L (profit and loss) to the sales dealer at deal entry, and this does not change unless the original traded details are amended," he says.
To implement the cover mode, about 20 additional fields had to be added to the transaction database, and Global Trader had to be upgraded so that sales and interbank dealers could both use the feature, Kelly says.
The desktop Global Trader was "very disk I/O [input-output] intensive on the local disk drive, and this has now been eliminated," Kelly says. The system is supported on three Microsoft Windows NT-based servers with Intel Pentium III Xeon 900 MHz dual-processor CPUs and 1GB RAM running RAID 1+0.
The bank also plans to use eGT to consolidate Asia/Pacific distribution into three centers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore. New York and London will follow. "However, we need to keep in mind local regulatory considerations," Kelly says.
The eGT software is also expected to improve transaction transparency at the bank, by offering a consolidated view of all trading positions globally, and the ability to inspect individual customer transactions, Kelly says.
The installation of eGT is not an isolated build; rather it is part of CBA’s strategic architecture plans, which involve "extending products and services to a greater number of distribution channels such as our acommercial and retail arm," Kelly says. The bank recently implemented Murex as a core system for interest rate derivatives and is in the process of implementing GFI Group’s Fenics as a front-end for the bank’s in-house FX options system, Kelly says.
Daniel Safarik
