Quartet Financial Systems today announced that Natixis has completed the implementation of ActivePivot version 1.4 and launched it in their short-term interest rates trading area with plans to roll it out further to other strategic areas of the bank.
Natixis approached Quartet Financial Systems when they realized their existing application to generate and report multiple risks (emphasis on basis risk – i.e. term, sector, and currency basis) and profit and loss figures for their short-term derivatives interest rate trading business was expensive to create and maintain, had multiple points of failure, was based on end-of-day data only, and was both slow and difficult to deploy.
With the Quartet Financial Systems ActivePivot now installed, Natixis enjoys real-time/intra-day risk and profit and loss data, fewer points of failure, less operational risk, reduced IT costs, and they find it more user functionality – all attributed to the use of ActivePivot. Natixis now has a visualization tool allowing their traders to see all of their risks side-by-side, by multiple currencies, books, and curve scenarios. Also, they can now view various indices of various products organized the way the users want to see it, including drill-down capabilities (i.e. into liquidity, spread risk, etc.).
ActivePivot is a real-time, object oriented OLAP tool that aggregates and applies business methods to any data, in any format. It is a scalable, easy to use, customizable solution that implements seamlessly across all platforms without imposing how it is applied or rolled out. These features enabled Natixis users to perform reporting and business intelligence analysis in real-time – a critical function for Natixis in an environment of increasingly complex transactions and fierce industry competition. Quartet’s strategy also allowed Natixis to choose the best-of-breed visualization and query tools, one of which is Microsoft Excel, giving their users the ability for flexible "slicing and dicing" of all risk and P&L data.
Laurent Fernandez, head of Derivatives Front Office IT at Natixis, claims: "Quartet’s ActivePivot is a cost effective solution that has resolved many key business and technical issues for Natixis and took the difficult and costly once-required maintenance out of our IT staff’s day-to-day hands and instead allowed the traders themselves to create the views they want, easily, and with enhanced functionality as well."
Georges Bory, Quartet founder and financial industry expert explained: "We were delighted when Natixis approached us to solve their mission-critical operational issues. The unique functionalities of ActivePivot enabled Natixis to mitigate risk and streamline operations that translated to direct bottom-line cost savings and improved user productivity."
