Price Explosion Prompts WestLB Revamp

German investment bank WestLB is revamping the way it contributes real-time prices to data vendors in order to cope with an expected 50 percent increase in the volume of prices that it contributes next year.

Last month the bank went live with Gissing Software's ConteX MCS contributions software to contribute real-time foreign exchange, money markets, fixed-income and credit prices to Bloomberg and Reuters from WestLB's London office. The software is also being used to contribute prices to Bloomberg from the bank's headquarters in Dusseldorf.

Alexandra Balloff, global head of market data management at WestLB in Dusseldorf, says the bank's clients are demanding more contributed data, and its traders want to be able to make more prices available.

In addition, WestLB has decided to make more of its prices available on Bloomberg, which has become a more important means of distributing prices to clients and the bank's own traders. Balloff says some traders ended up paying for Reuters screens just to see WestLB's own prices.

Previously the bank contributed prices directly to Reuters from its Reuters data distribution platforms and used a different vendor add-on to send that data to Bloomberg. But that add-on, which Balloff declines to name, was not designed as a contributions system and could not cope with the anticipated increases in volume. It had to be completely shut down and rebooted every time the bank wanted to add data on a new instrument, she says.

So in February, the bank sent a request for proposal for a new contributions system to six vendors. Gissing installed a pilot system in April and was selected in July, says Gissing founder and chief technology officer Richard Gissing. WestLB then asked Gissing to develop a new input handler for ConteX to take data from a CSV file of end-of-day prices to send mark-to-market prices to Bloomberg.

The price data itself is drawn from many different sources, including Excel spreadsheets, pricing tools, databases and other applications, Balloff says.

The next step will be to expand the software to enable the bank's Dusseldorf office to contribute prices to Reuters as well. This will involve configuring ConteX's Reuters input handler to recognize and subscribe to the required data, and then mapping that data for the appropriate output, Gissing says.

WestLB is also considering deploying ConteX at its new trading floor in Tokyo, although it may have Tokyo send prices to WestLB in Dusseldorf rather than install extra ConteX servers there. "If they are only contributing one or two pages, it is not worth it," Balloff says.

But she adds that if the bank chooses not to use ConteX in Tokyo, it would have to assess the bandwidth and potential latency issues between the two locations.