The project, for leading Austrian bank RZB, delivered over 250 complex cross-asset derivative products in just 19 months, all within the original time lines and to budget.

This project was particularly significant because of the complexity and variety of products involved and the full STP functionality delivered to Front, Middle and Back Office, Risk and Finance.

Phase 1 focused on the delivery of 90 complex derivatives around interest rates and forex.
Phase 2 increased in complexity and delivered an additional 160 complex derivative products, encapsulating equities, commodities, credit, structured products and flex integration.
Phase 3, completed earlier this week, delivered the whole back office and integration component, producing the final, full front to back solution. This phase delivered complete accounting confirmations, settlements and integration to all downstream systems.

During the course of the project the Excelian team deployed their proprietary Datamart Framework solution, provided the translation (ETL) process to the RZB data warehouse, built a bespoke Flex solution and integrated both Murex VaR and MLC modules.

However the real key to success was the delivery of fast, accurate and repeatable testing. Using Excelian's market leading SMART product, for test automation, gave dramatic time savings across the project for smoke, regression and reconciliation testing.

SMART reduced the booking time of over 500 complex derivative trades from 15 man days to just 90 minutes. It also reduced the time taken to enter 100 events from 9 man days to 1 hour, while at the same time ensuring automatic failure detection, error message capture, defect record creation and automated test reporting.

Excelian is widely known as Europe's leading specialist Murex consultancy and has one of the world's largest teams of Murex experts. Even so, says Phil Roberts, Head of Excelian's Murex Practice and the te team's overall project manager "the scale of confirmations, data mart integration and accounting build on this project is absolutely unprecedented anywhere in our sector. It was a demanding but also exciting project - and I am delighted that both Excelian team and tools more than rose to that challenge."

Client Dr Harald Schaschinger, RZB's Head of IT competence commented "Excelian has brought its expertise and commitment to RZB and worked with us to successfully deliver on schedule a complex cross asset, front to back Mx3.1 implementation. We made the right choice of partner."