The Review Framework component, which provides a complete environment for exception handling and selective straight through processing (STP), now incorporates sophisticated features that will help investment banks mitigate exposure by reaching trade confirmation stage quicker and more securely.

When coupled with the Thunderhead Document Generation Platform, the highly intuitive browser-based Review Framework enables trading organisations to deal with vanilla and exotic derivative trades in one environment. Designed to give financial services organisations visibility across the entire trade confirm process by applying business rules to the automated production of documents using natural language, Review Framework will identify occurrences when incoming transaction data falls outside the parameters of a Review Rule.

Thunderhead integrates with leading business process management (BMP) and workflow solutions to route such documents for manual editing. This increased level of business user control helps companies reduce risk by managing text and data items efficiently to bring trade confirms to the compliant, documented phase more rapidly.

"As derivatives trading becomes more complex and as a higher proportion of trades fall outside normal STP configurations, the need for Investment Banks to manage exceptions faster is more pronounced than ever before," said Glen Manchester, Thunderhead CEO. "As regulatory issues grow in importance, there is significant monetary value in reducing risk through compliant communications processes such as Review Framework, which enables Derivative Operations teams to streamline the management of exceptions."

The ability of Review Framework to automate the full spectrum of trade confirmations translates into immediate business advantage through the reduction of the usual costs associated with manual document creation and management of exceptions. In addition, and as an important factor in ensuring regulatory compliance, an auditable trail of track changes can easily be generated for each trade.

"The cost to financial organisations of managing and clearing trade exceptions runs into millions of pounds annually. Thunderhead's Review Framework combats this by offering a proven environment for rapid and intuitive handling of exceptions, which delivers quality assurance, regulatory control and automation to improve productivity and reduce costs," Manchester continued.

Specific features of the Review Framework component are as follows:

• The editing function allows users to easily modify column, row, border and shading parameters or to insert ad hoc data-driven shared content and lock-down paragraph content.
• Review Framework provides written guidelines to assist reviewers, plus full audit and track change capability.
• The component allows organisations to manually inspect documents prior to dispatch.
• The search facility allows free-text search and pre-view of shared content in stored in the Thunderhead.
• Review Framework is also offered as an embeddable component or as a stand-alone application.