State Street Launches Industry Leading Over-the-Counter Derivatives Servicing Platform

New Platform Automates Processing of Over-The-Counter Derivatives to Streamline Administration for Growing Market Segment

State Street Corporation, the world’s leading provider of financial services to institutional investors, announced today the launch of an industry leading over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives servicing platform. Already beta-tested, the OTC Hub is now live with PIMCO, a leading global asset manager and long-time State Street customer.

The OTC Hub is a global, end-to-end servicing solution that automates a number of stages in derivatives processing including customer reporting, electronic trade flow and the reconciliation of positions and cash flows between the middle and back offices. The State Street platform will now reconcile data from the industry utilities and dealers to customer trade details and automates acquisition of vendor prices. The platform is flexible to allow for enhanced services and capabilities as the derivatives market evolves and industry technologies mature.

“This cutting-edge technology provides an excellent opportunity to automate what has been a manually driven and complex part of our investment servicing operations,” said Richard Tyson, executive vice president of PIMCO. “Throughout our long partnership, State Street has consistently delivered advanced technological solutions for the challenges that come with a changing marketplace.”

State Street’s new platform, The OTC Hub, automates the processing of OTC derivatives, one of the fastest growing asset classes. Since 1999, the volume of derivatives contracts has surpassed an estimated US$600 trillion, 83 percent of which has originated in the over-the-counter (OTC) market.

“The use of over-the-counter derivatives is growing rapidly and this new scalable solution will enable us to handle both the increasing volume and complexity of these transactions,” said Joe Antonellis, vice chairman of State Street. “We are pleased to offer PIMCO, a world leader in fixed-income asset management, and our customers globally a seamless solution for their derivatives.”

State Street’s enhanced platform fully supports Financial products Markup Language (FpML), a key component to servicing derivatives, and provides rich validation rules to ISDA FpML standards. Its strong price validation functionality includes both internal and customer model calculations for comparison. Additionally, the OTC Hub also provides greater depth of trade details and economics, which allows enhanced research and issue resolution.

State Street’s customers will benefit from having all aspects of their derivatives transactions automated with online access to detailed information such as resets and settlements, valuations, exposure and other risk information. These capabilities will be available via State Street’s industry leading portal, my.statestreet.com.

“The interactive-views function enables customers to easily and efficiently navigate the complexity of their derivative transactions and drill down, graph, customize and export data in a variety of ways,” said Neil Wright, senior vice president and product manager for derivatives at State Street. “Information from the OTC Hub delivered via my.statestreet.com is customized for specific customer roles, easing the implementation and adoption of State Street’s derivatives processing capabilities.”

Further demonstrating its experience in the derivatives space, State Street will launch its next Vision Series report on the topic of derivatives in late September 2008.

About State Street

State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT - News) is the world's leading provider of financial services to institutional investors including investment servicing, investment management and investment research and trading. With $15.3 trillion in assets under custody and $1.9 trillion in assets under management at June 30, 2008, State Street operates in 26 countries and more than 100 geographic markets worldwide. For more information, visit State Street’s website at www.statestreet.com.

About PIMCO

PIMCO, founded in 1971, is a global investment management firm serving a wide range of institutional and retail investors worldwide. With offices in nine countries in North America, Europe and Asia, we manage investments across a broad spectrum of global financial markets. Our success is built on our philosophy of seeking to consistently deliver attractive return opportunities while maintaining a strong culture of risk management. PIMCO is owned by Allianz Global Investors, a subsidiary of the Munich-based Allianz Group, among the leading global insurance companies.

Source:Businesswire

Publish Date: August 21, 2008

Sapient Buys Derivatives Consulting Group

Boston-based IT consulting firm Sapient has acquired London-based Derivatives Consulting Group Limited, a provider of derivatives consulting and outsourcing services to investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and commercial banking clients, including derivative operations metrics, the result of benchmark surveys of buy-side and sell-side firms.
DCG will become part of Sapient's Trading and Risk Management practice. It will add operations benchmarking, derivatives and process expertise, operations support, technology services and off-shore capabilities to the group.

"Today's volatile markets and increasingly strict regulatory environments make this an opportune time to add DCG's capabilities to our TRM practice," said Sapient president and chief executive officer Alan Herrick.'"Regulatory scrutiny has resulted in new demands on clients to maintain compliance and reduce the risk associated with the growing complexity and volumes of these transactions."

Sapient's acquisition of DCG is supported by a number of trends: The worldwide derivatives market reached $677 trillion notional in 2007 and continues to grow dramatically, according to Celent.'While derivatives volumes have grown, there has been a lag in operations infrastructure investments. This has created greater demand for operations support and technology.'At the same time, government agencies such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.K. Financial Services Authority have increased the regulation and scrutiny of derivatives transactions, further compounding the existing operational challenges.

Source URL: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Q0I4OGW5AJGR4QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=210000320
Publish Date: August 08, 2008

Julius Finance Announces Credit Derivatives Valuation Service

Service to use model fusion to determine what synthetic credit derivatives are worth.

The same week Merrill Lynch announced a $5.7 billion write-down on collateralized debt obligations, Julius Finance, a provider of analytics engines and services for evaluating credit derivatives, has launched a new valuation service for estimating the value and risk of such products.

The new service will price bespoke synthetic credit derivative obligations, CDO squared, CDO cubed, constant proportion portfolio insurance, constant proportion debt obligations and credit default swaps. The valuation service makes use of Julius Finance's research in model fusion, which prices such securities by taking account of all market available information through a unified credit model.


The service is designed to assist with bespoke valuation, risk management, catastrophic risk analysis, portfolio management, scenario analysis, structured/hybrid products and trading. It's meant to be used by credit traders, credit risk managers, auditors, legal professionals and controllers.


Julius also provides market driven tail risk estimates for credit default swap and corporate bond portfolio managers, and unique insights into monoline companies such as credit derivative product companies.


Source URL: http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209901408
Publish Date: Aug 01, 2008