Asia Awards 2022: Best front-to-back-office integration initiative—Cassini Systems
OVERVIEW
To manage operational and trading costs, it is becoming essential to have a unified view of post-trade costs for front-office, risk, treasury, and collateral management operations. Collateralized trading, collateral liquidity constraints and higher dealer costs are presenting challenges for buy-side firms. Overcoming functional and technological silos is a challenge, as firms’ order management, risk, treasury management, and collateral management departments do not have access to any of the others’ book of record systems. Cassini aims to overcome this problem through integration.
“As part of our strategic vision, we onboarded Cassini’s Analytics platform to first meet the requirements of Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR) and understand the cost implications ahead of the go-live date. As we execute against our funding and collateral vision, we will look to take advantage of the full front-to-back margin and collateral optimization analytics, from pre-trade to end-of-day modules, focusing on transparency into margin drivers, enhanced pre-trade decision-making, and the ability to compare initial margin (IM) numbers with dealers—giving T. Rowe Price more oversight of our trading portfolios.”
Kevin Khokhar, associate director for derivatives and multi-asset trading solutions and head of collateral and funding strategy, T. Rowe Price
THE SOLUTION
The Cassini suite of services supports pre-trade, post trade, and end-of-day functions. The platform offers a 360-degree view of post-trade risk and cost for the front-, middle-, and back-office systems by integrating domain-specific information between their offices. And by integrating the trading portfolios, collateral, and operational data with risk and optimization models, trading decisions are improved, collateral impact is minimized, and all-in trading costs are made transparent. Core models and data are consumed from each part of an organization to produce analytic models that fit seamlessly into existing workflows, with clients able to integrate optimization into every step of the trade life cycle.
WHY THEY WON
Partnerships
Cassini has integrated its platform with BlackRock’s Aladdin offering, Vermeg’s Colline collateral management solution, and the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR)
Cassini’s UMR threshold capabilities have been enhanced. This includes the Aana Management Service with UMR/standard initial margin model (Simm) threshold monitoring and Notional Reduction Tools. The UMR compliance module has also been improved with back-testing benchmarking.
Coverage
Cassini gained coverage for over 15 new derivatives exchanges.
Rollouts
Among other additions, Cassini introduced a new user interface, new packaged tools, API integration for margin attribution, and newly packaged solutions to better suit the needs of hedge funds.
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