Version 2.1 adds real-time cross-asset class P&L functionality and exception-based processing for multiple asset classes including equities, credit derivatives, interest rate derivatives and fixed income, providing front-to-back straight-through processing (STP).

"With the latest release of FRONT ARENA we are delivering a cross-asset class system with greater depth and flexibility," explained Mats Lillienberg, chief technology officer at Front. "It's a standard package that also lays the foundation for the migration to a service-oriented architecture and offers support for Linux. It will help our customers benefit both from the easy-to-use functional enhancements as well as the improved scalability and performance of their systems."

Claudio Camplani, head of Global Treasury at BDG Lugano, said, "With the new functionality of FRONT ARENA 2.1 we were able to migrate our previous in-house extensions to the core product with increased flexibility provided by the FRONT ARENA Trading Manager. By having more functionality in the core, performance has been enhanced. Less reliance on extensions will help us to take on new releases faster as well as helping to lower the cost of system ownership."

FRONT ARENA 2.1 helps banks to evaluate profit and loss in terms of risk factor changes. It provides answers to questions such as: "What proportion of total P&L is due to changes in time, interest rates and credit spreads?" This type of analysis provides traders and risk managers with immediate feedback about the factors driving their profits and is particularly useful for those trading structured products. It furthermore provides a useful tool for reconciling differences in profit and loss calculations and for highlighting certain processing problems during the end-of-day procedures.

For the back-office, FRONT ARENA 2.1 introduces the Settlement Manager, an application that manages high settlement volumes in an exception-based environment to support all OTC traded asset classes. Transparency is improved as information about trades can be sliced up into more manageable pieces using work queues.

A number of areas have been streamlined to help enhance the user experience and simplify data access, as well as improve security. All permission settings are managed centrally and all FRONT ARENA components share the same authentication mechanism, which helps to further reduce administration costs.