Company: Asia-Pacific Financial Institution
QuIC Structured Product Solution™ delivers flexible modeling platform for pricing and risk analysis

The Client
A major Asia-Pacific financial institution, and one of the largest global issuers of European Medium Term Notes (EMTNs).

The Challenge
The client sought to expand their offering of structured products, specifically in the EMTN market, but required an improved risk management and regulatory reporting solution. Their current infrastructure was unable to provide a flexible modeling environment to structure more complex instruments, and was preventing them from pursuing more profitable trades.

The Solution
QuIC Financial Technologies approached the client in late 2004, while the client was in the final stages of a competitive evaluation of major solutions vendors.  The client’s competitive analysis showed that the majority of systems did not meet their requirements, however, QuIC demonstrated a solution superior to those of competing vendors.

In less than six weeks from the client’s initial expression of interest, QuIC developers had a working prototype that linked various components of a trade, such as defining coupons and call dates, and allowed structurers to represent a trade’s payout in a user-friendly environment. The prototype proved capable of reconstructing and running the client’s entire test portfolio and handled more financial instruments than any competitor’s solution, and in a fraction of the time.

Rapid Development
QuIC was awarded a contract to implement the complete QuIC Structured Product Solution™ in March 2005. After a short period of consultation, collaboration and testing, the solution was implemented and full regulatory approval was received within months of deployment.

Competitive Advantage
The client now enjoys a significant competitive advantage: they can quickly develop innovative new trades, run the risk analyses required by regulatory authorities, and bring trades to market in a time frame that was previously unheard of. Since the launch, the client has enhanced their risk-analysis toolkit, by adding more models and trade structures, thereby increasing the number of financial contracts and transactions they can bring to market.

With the QuIC Structured Product Solution, the client now has the ability to trade new structures, employ new financial transactions such as Constant Maturity Swap (CMS) spread transactions, and price these with greater accuracy. In addition, the client has the ability to further augment their risk tools by calculating Value at Risk (VaR) on their entire portfolio of structured products, all within the same GUI and calculation environment, at calculation speeds previously unheard of.

The QuIC Structured Product Solution™ delivers an unmatched ability to bring complex new trades to market quickly and properly manage the risk for single trading instruments or entire portfolios. The speed and scalability allows structurers to continually develop new scenarios to explore multiple simulations in a single evaluation. Modeling tools and calculation power is placed directly in the hands of traders, allowing risk analysis calculations to be performed on-demand, in real time.