Quartet Financial Systems is proud to announce that from hundreds of entries submitted to Finextra's Innovation Showcase, both of its software component submissions, ActivePivot and ActiveStream, were chosen as the most innovative in providing solutions to key issues in the industry today - namely real-time risk, VaR, and P&L and lifecycle management for better auditing reducing operational risk.
ActivePivot, for flexible and real time reporting, is an object-based, in-memory business intelligence tool that provides information dashboards from front office to back office including risk, profit and loss and hedging analytics, trade blotters, inventory positions, cash flow and security inventories, etc. It innovates from existing OLAP engines with its capability to plug-in client's business logic, including non-linear aggregations such as VaR, to manipulate and aggregate complex objects without depending on relational databases, to aggregate and slice very large data sets in real-time. These features enable the user to perform business intelligence analysis and reporting in real-time, allowing the user to create their own views/reports quickly and easily, with drill down and drill through capabilities to reconcile and better understand aggregated figures. Standard user interfaces such as MS Excel™ can be used and configured by the user, thus saving costs on bespoke IT reporting developments. ActivePivot also allows considerable cost savings compared to traditional risk reporting applications thanks to its easy implementation (a matter of a few weeks) and the possibility to reuse it across many business areas with simply plugging in specific business logic.
ActiveStream is a trade lifecycle management component that reduces operational risk by delivering fully auditable and secure trade processing on exotic and flow trades and provides a cost effective platform to support trade innovation by leveraging the bank's investments in quantitative libraries. Its unique bi-temporal engine manages independent business and system time lines to properly represent real life activity and to facilitate "as of date" queries. It maintains the causality of trade modifications to facilitate audit and regulatory requirements, control operational risk, and help stamp out fraudulent trading practices. In particular, ActiveStream stops the practice of cancelling and then re-bookin re-booking trades that need to be modified - instead all modifications are made on trade change request that is applied to the trade and any subsequent requests then get played over on that modified trade. It even allows the front and middle office to see what-if scenarios like what the trade would have looked like had it been exercised when the option arose, etc. The data model is flexible to support many booking models across asset classes such as flow trading, OTC derivatives, issuances, etc., and is easy to extend so that the middle and back office can keep up with the front office innovation at quite a reasonable cost.
Elton Cane, strategy director, Finextra states "In launching the Innovation Showcase, we sought to highlight some of the most interesting financial technology developments over the past 12 months. What were we looking for? Newness, uniqueness and impact; clever ways of solving a problem; and projects at the leading edge of new industry trends." Specifically referring to Quartet's two software components, Elton says "ActivePivot and ActiveStream are two very clever technologies that are addressing some major issues in the industry today - fraud and real-time risk - while maintaining alignment with flexible SOA methodologies and trends in data manipulation for grid/cloud."