Leading European Bank: Trading and Risk Services

Accenture's experience and ongoing research into characteristics of high-performance businesses reveals that top companies are obsessed with winning the battle for the customer. In many cases, winning this battle starts with improving customer satisfaction.

In its efforts to become a high-performance business, the client recognized the opportunity to provide better, faster service to its customers by modernizing its trading architecture. The goal was to replace a homegrown system—which was inefficient and increasingly expensive to maintain, enhance and operate—with Mx Generation 2000, a banking software suite from Murex.

For help in migrating to the new system, the bank wanted to team with a provider that had deep industry knowledge, superior program management capabilities and proven experience implementing Murex applications for large financial institutions. Accenture handily met these criteria. In addition, Accenture had already demonstrated its ongoing commitment to helping the bank achieve high performance through a number of previous projects.

Accenture teamed with the client to manage the trading architecture implementation. The first step involved assessing the technical and functional requirements for the migration to the Murex Mx Generation 2000 software. As part of the requirement-gathering phase, the Accenture-led team paid special attention to meeting the recently passed International Financial Reporting Standards standards.

In implementing the new system, the team migrated the bank's interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives from its existing Murex MxRates application; extended the new application to cover equities, money market and FX trading product categories; and implemented all traded products in the front office and back office areas. Accenture's previous experience in migrating systems to the Murex architecture allowed the team to complete the migration quickly and efficiently. To support the new comprehensive trading architecture, Accenture also helped the bank define and implement a number of new trading processes.

With Accenture's help, the bank has implemented the Murex Mx Generation 2000 solution, which addresses all of its global trading, risk management and processing requirements across asset classes. The new architecture provides a unified view of the overall trading positions. It offers a consistent, real-time valuation of all products on the basis of individual trades across all locations. And it allows the bank to implement new products faster and more efficiently and even trade credit derivatives. In all these ways, the bank is providing improved customer service and positioning itself for high performance for years to come.