SunGard has released the latest version of its cross-asset trading solution, Front Arena. Version 4.2 offers support for high volume FX and money market transactions, is able to price derivative instruments faster and can handle larger volumes of complex trades. This latest version of Front Arena includes three new features: support for grid computing; remote sheet calculations for large portfolios; and enhanced memory management.
Front Arena 4.2 has a single calculation engine, making it easier for customers to integrate new products. It also has a scenario engine and allows for parallel calculations – thus helping lower total cost for integration for new instruments and easier integration of new models. Other features include: support for processing all major FX transaction types in an integrated cross-asset class application; a new server-side quoting component for highly competitive response times; better position analysis as standard; access to Front Arena business logic in Excel®; enhanced operations functionality; and new instrument support for fixed income, interest rate derivatives, credit products and structured equity products. It also supports the latest release of SunGard’s Monis for pricing of convertible bonds, and can use SunGard’s Adaptiv confirmation manager for back-office confirmations on equity derivatives.
A series of performance tests for Front Arena 4.2 were conducted with the solution running on Sun Microsystems’ SPARC Enterprise M8000 using four, direct attached Sun StorageTek 6140 Fibre Channel storage arrays. The M8000 was equipped with 256GB RAM and 16 SPARC64 VI dual-core processors running @ 2.28 GHz.
Ambreesh Khanna, global head, financial services industry at Sun Microsystems, explained: "Front Arena 4.2 has been performance tested in collaboration with our systems, with simulations typical of tier one banks. With over 350 trades per second being processed through the system and over 100 simulated clients attached, users experienced sub-second position updates for large interbank trades."
Tim Dodd, head of product management for SunGard’s Front Arena, commented: "Instruments like equity basket options, collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) and other path dependent instruments have become commonplace. The complexity and diversity of these vanilla instruments makes it tough to price them, therefore traders and risk managers need to get as much as they can out of hardware improvements such as parallel processing and grid computing. Front Arena 4.2 is designed to address this need."
