In the world of FX and cash management, real-time is a necessity and WestLB needed a platform that would allow them to not only cater to the demanding volumes the foreign exchange business brings, but also able to handle heavy market data refreshes that would continually be changing the calculations and data the front office would need to view.

A wide variety of reports were required to give traders the flexibility to see P&L, risk and cash flows by counterparty, currency pairs, books. All the screens needed to update in real-time in response to both market data changes and new trade business. It was also important to be able to see views broken out by time bucket and drill down to the cash flow dates. The reports show cash flows and cash balances, mark to market, intra-day P&L, month-to-date and year-to-date P&L. In addition to the P&L and inventory reports, a real-time blotter was required showing trading activity with additional data displayed including trade valuation and P&L.

Using ActivePivot's flexible and unique object-based, in-memory, real-time aggregation OLAP engine, WestLB are now able to provide the flexibility to integrate the trader's requirements - in terms of both business logic and the ability to slice & dice the data any way they want to see it. WestLB were also able to put in place a SOA tool that has a cost structure compatible with their ROI requirements which enabled them to provide the same level of functionality that they had with a leading FX trading system - but at a fraction of the cost.

With ActivePivot, WestLB can now:
• enjoy rationalization of systems which provided immediate cost saving to the bank
• provide the seamless user experience they were seeking
• deliver the real-time requirements to the business users with excellent performance and scalability
• have complete control over the system due to ActivePivot's pluggable architecture allowture allowing them to be independent from veendor
• have the ability to grow and scale the business as volumes grow, and have the capacity to extend the product further themselves in the future
• fulfill the promise of SOA due to ActivePivot's use of open standards such as MDX, XMLA, Web Services, etc.
• supply the traders with the ability to view the data directly in Microsoft Excel with either a template view (pre-built standard views) or create their own views/reports/blotters with full drill-down and drill-through capabilities and do this totally on their own
• fulfill the ROI promise as the project was implemented quickly and total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

WestLB now has the framework to provide their front and middle office with true real-time reporting capabilities along with the more advanced benefits of OLAP technology to investigate that data at many levels, with full slice & dice functionality. With this first application complete, WestLB can now turn to using ActivePivot for other applications that would require this same unique real-time functionality.

Dr. Gerd Börker, Head of IT Capital Markets at WestLB says, "We were moving our FX/MM business from one vendor system onto another one. However, we found gaps in the functionality of the target system. In order to fill these gaps we looked to Quartet's ActivePivot. With their true real-time OLAP technology and their integration features we were able to fulfill these missing requirements and now we have satisfied users and a lower total cost of ownership".

Xavier Bellouard, a Quartet founder and its UK Managing Director, says "We are happy to have WestLB join our client base and look forward to working with them in the future on many more real-time applications required throughout the bank. The work we did with WestLB on this project provides a further step to strengthening ActivePivot's market presence as a product that combines both OLAP's deep analysis functionality with the benefits of CEP's real-time decision-making capabilities".

Dr. Reinhard Eppler, who managed the ActivePivot project at WestLB, is still amazed about the speed at which the proof-of-concept had been developed: "Within a very short time frame, the prototype was ready and the capabilities of the realtime OLAP tool could be demonstrated to the users. Incrementally the missing functionality was added, which enabled us to provide the final solution in time within the aggressive project deadline.