UniCredit is employing Application Virtualisation technology to improve the processing capabilities of its central pricing application - named "Bulldozer" - to deliver timely and compliant financial figures, while reducing the firm's exposure to operational risk. The GridServer deployment supports the unique pricing of the group's banking book, a requirement of International Accounting Standard (IAS) 39 and Basel II.

Under IAS 39 and Basel II, European banks are required to establish principles for recognising and measuring corporate holdings within their banking books. These include financial assets, financial liabilities and some contracts to buy or sell non-financial items. With strict compliance deadlines, UniCredit's Capital Allocation Unit needed a system that could uniquely generate financial figures and perform computation in the least amount of time possible. The bank's IT department, UniCredit Global Information Service (UGIS), turned to DataSynapse as a leader of Application Virtualisation technology.

DataSynapse's Application Virtualisation software enables application services to be distributed and executed across a shared, heterogeneous infrastructure. By creating a virtualised environment that matches user demand with supply of available system and data resources, GridServer provides an "on-demand" environment that dramatically improves application performance, resiliency and uptime.

UniCredit has developed its Bulldozer pricing application for use with DataSynapse's GridServer virtualisation software to optimise processing of its financial results both intra-day and end-of-day. This has significantly reduced the minimum processing time for even the most complex of trade pricing and modelling calculations. Using the GridServer software has maximised computing efficiencies with UniCredit's Bulldozer application to enable UniCredit's Capital Allocation Unit to price more than two million deals in less than two hours. These figures are then populated to the bank's accounting, finance and legal entity departments.

"The enhanced computing power GridServer provides our pricing software has exceeded targets beyond our expectations. Our original goal when we embarked on this project was to independently price 600,000 deals in an hour. We are now doing twice that figure," said Alberto Ricciotti, head of Group Pricing for the Capital Allocation Unit at UniCredit. "We are also significantly reducing our operational risk and lessening any redundancy in data generation. By having a unique financial model that is valued at a group level, we avoid any data inconsistencies provided by different groups within the bank."

"The performance gains realised by UniCredit are extremely compelling. UniCredit is effectively deploying DataSynapse software to better align IT with changing business and compliance priorities," said Alun Baker, senior vice president and managing director for EMEA at DataSynapse. "We look forward to helping the bank realise even greater efficiencies as they expand the use of our GridServer software through their enterprise."

Following its successful implementation, UGIS is now evaluating the introduction of GridServer technology to its Austrian and German branches later this year.