Automatic instrument opening in Avaloq for Bank Sarasin & Co. Ltd

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• Interface with Avaloq
• Telekurs VDF integration
• Increased automation in the processing of financial data

Bank Sarasin & Co Ltd, a Basel-based private bank with a strong international focus, has been using the data management solution GAIN Data Management from AIM Software since 2002 for the processing of Telekurs VDF, which included a fully-fledged reporting system for all VDF data.

"We greatly appreciate the easy handling of GAIN Management, giving us the possibility to build up queries and to extract data coming from any type of data feed. GAIN allows us to quickly elaborate all new requests on our own, offering a wide range of functionalities", comments Markus Rust, Bank Sarasin & Co. Ltd.

By the end of 2003, Bank Sarasin & Co Ltd decided to start a pilot project for having an interface created with GAIN for the opening of instruments in Avaloq. The data feed used at Bank Sarasin & Co. Ltd is the VDF (Valor Data Feed) from Telekurs Financial. Future extensions might target sourcing in additional sources through the same interface.

Automatic opening of instruments a main demand
Whenever a bank adds a new instrument to its portfolio, it must first be opened in the banking application, which in the case of Sarasin is Avaloq. The request for the opening of an instrument may come from either the trading room, a client using the internet banking platform or any department that needs information on an instrument. For this purpose, banking applications demand a set of mandatory fields which are still often entered manually by an employee in the back office department who has to search for the data in various sources which is rather time-consuming and error-prone. The automatic opening feature of GAIN delivers all necessary fields from a data feed without manual interference. This ensures significant time and cost savings for the bank and eliminates the risk of flawed inputs.

GAIN Data Management allows to check all imported data prior to export to the banking application. A further increase of data quality is achieved through additional control reports. In case of exceptions, an intuitive interface provides a view on the data flagged as faulty and risky or where the bank defined that this data has to be checked manually in any case.

"The automatic integration from VDF data into Avaloq through GAIN Data Management provides an added value to Bank Sarasin & Co. Ltd, since the trading room can start trading the instruments earlier", states Rust.

Instrument opening in Avaloq
The automatic opening process comprises the following steps: As GAIN runs in the background the user starts the opening directly in an Avaloq dialog.

Once initiated, the instrument opening process is executed using the "adhoc delivery" function in the GAIN Data Management sending the requested instrument identifiers to GAIN by Avaloq. GAIN forwards this request to Telekurs and waits until the data is delivered by the Telekurs server. Once available, the data is downloaded and imported in GAIN.

In the course of processing the Telekurs data, several VDF code domains are being mapped to Avaloq code domains with the mapping engine of the GAIN DataDesktop, such as asset types, interest calculation methods, option types, currencies or domiciles.

GAIN finally creates an XML output for Avaloq and transfers it using t he Avaloq message interface. An additional control report for the imported data is created automatically. Thereby, the end user has the possibility to perform a final check before the delivered data, thus ensuring highest quality

Trends and tendencies in automation
In most institutions, the automation degree in the processing of financial data is still very low. This finding is underlined by the recent AIM Global Data and Risk Management Survey, which was conducted amongst over 1,600 banks from more than 50 countries. In fact, 29% of all approached banks worldwide state that they currently plan to increase the level of automation for static (reference) data. 30% of the banks in Western Europe and a significantly high percentage of 42% of Swiss banks claimed to have the same plan.

Due to the growing need for the reduction of cost and of operational risks, more and more clients of AIM Software are scaling up their data integration and automation efforts. This is being supported by the integration philosophy of AIM Software: A step-by-step integration of data management in order to achieve higher efficiency and lower project risk for the banks.

About Bank Sarasin & Co.Ltd
Sarasin & Co.Ltd. is an international bank with its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, offering services to clients in Private, Personal and Institutional Banking as well as in the investment funds area.

For further information please contact:
AIM Software
T: +43-1-5124652
office@aimsoftware.com
www.aimsoftware.com