The new BPU banking group, formed in July 2003, is faced with the task of increasing its market share and is expecting the trading of cross-asset class products to grow future revenue. "To help us achieve this business goal we needed to source a software product that would make the handling of new structures as easy as any plain-vanilla product," says Paolo Chiaia, Chief of Finance for Centrobanca.

"After detailed analysis of software products on the market we selected Summit’s MUST product with its BGM model for pricing. One objective was to help our traders easily enter structured trades and MUST certainly achieves that. In addition, its front-to-back integration means that our back-office team will be able to see the same transaction details that the trader first entered. This will help us speed-up time to market of new products and better manage the associated risk."

Moreover, the Bank has licensed Summit’s eToolkit in order to provide its traders with a bi-directional integration between their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and the Summit solution. The eToolkit also enables quant teams to access the Summit financial libraries, integrate proprietary pricing models and design customised analytics.

Stefano Godarini, Head of Technology and Operations for Centrobanca further adds, "Part of this implementation will help us with our IAS39 compliance as Summit interfaces with our general ledger and with Puma2 for monthly regulatory reporting to the Central Bank of Italy. We will also benefit from improved generation of confirmations as Summit solution allows non-standard confirmations to be edited directly in Microsoft Word."

"The Bank has been a Summit customer for the last 3 years," adds Michael Ctorza, Italian Market Sales Manager for Summit. "They started with Summit covering interest rate derivatives and FX options from front office to back office and later added equity swaps and structured bonds. We are pleased that BPU chose us above other suppliers to benefit from the competitive advantage of our innovative MUST application."

The Bank is one of the leading financial institutions to use MUST on Summit FT, which is Summit’s thin-client and web-based solution that was launched in September 2003.