SST Awards 2018: Best Sell-Side Back-Office Platform—Murex

Murex’s MX.3 platform, responsible for delivering the Paris-based vendor its first SST Award, provides an end-to-end centralized and open operating model for both operations and finance departments. It is based on a common and unique trade and position repository and a shared computational layer across business functions. “It enables users to onboard either the whole or part of the value chain of a given business line and allows an organization to re-think their IT landscape the way they want it,” explains Etienne Ravex, head of post-trade operations at Murex. The platform has been designed to remove internal reconciliation requirements and also streamline operational processes across business lines. 

The cross-asset platform manages equities, foreign-exchange (FX), credits, rates and commodities products, from vanilla cash to the most complex derivatives. According to Ravex, regulatory and cost pressure, the emergence of market utilities, and a pressing need for thorough capital cost measurement and allocation, are becoming central considerations in the operations and finance domain. “We believe that the operations and finance function will fast become a core business enabler,” he says. “Our solution centralizes the transactional reporting and processing of trades, positions and margin calls across all instrument types, trading sources and settlement routes.” 

The introduction of IFRS 9 and related accounting standards updates could represent the first milestone in moving toward a more global convergence of front office, risk and accounting valuations, shared across a financial institution. Ravex says this trend presents a challenge in terms of change management. “From a software perspective, a cross-asset, front-to-back platform such as MX.3, provides a unified framework for all three functions and would provide valuable support on this journey,” he says. 

Murex invests more than €100 million ($118 million) in research and development to continue delivering technical and functional solutions to its clients, according to the firm. Ravex explains that Murex has been using an Agile approach internally to develop the MX.3 capital markets platform. “Our Agile journey started with a core team of engineers and is being extended to our entire software factory of more than 1,000 people,” he explains. “This represents a huge change in executing the full development cycle.”