First Union is reporting significant performance gains in processing fixed income derivatives following the introduction of technology which utilises idle computing power to perform memory-intensive processing tasks.
The bank says the implementation of technology from New York-based DataSynapse has helped to transform its processing performance and throughput for portfolio risk analysis from an end-of-day cycle to a near real-time, on-demand basis.
First Union applied the privately-held firm's WebProc solution to marshal intermittently idle and underutilised PCs in its capital markets areas and link those network resources dynamically to its trading application. This architecture has thus far delivered performance gains that have reduced compute times from many hours to minutes for even the most complex asset classes, says Joe Belciglio, First Union's managing director of trading technology.
"Our goal was to derive greater revenue from our desk by improving our existing distribution architecture and harnessing performance gains out of our production environment," he explains. "As an added benefit, leveraging the idle capacity of our existing network resources lets us evaluate new strategies and model innovations we didn't have the resources for previously."