ABN Amro Relies on MXG Team for Murex Rework

According to MXG Team, the rework involved a redesign and build of the Murex EOD offering, resulting in a significant improvement of processing times ─ overall, processing times were cut by approximately 50 percent, while significant performance gains were also realized. The nature of the work entailed extensive reconfiguration of Murex launchers, SQL extractions, table indexing, and EOD processes.

"MXG Team brought unparalleled expertise and commitment to this project, delivering a significant reduction in lead times around business-critical reporting activities on Murex," says Dick van Driel, program manager for Murex Enigma at ABN AMRO. "This was an incredibly complex task, not least for the scope of our Murex installation and the technical challenges it presented. The delivery by MXG Team is therefore all the more commendable.

Time Reduction
In addition to other enhancements, integrated VaR reporting generation time was reduced by 40 percent, with a successful migration of the computation process from Solaris to Linux. This allowed for the introduction of the bank's Internal Model Method (IMM) reporting framework.

Using hyper-threading technology on Linux, each trade in Murex is calculated 2000 times as part of historical/stressed VaR scenarios, with risk being decomposed by portfolio, deal, risk factor, and counterparty, covering marginal and incremental VaR. The outcome, according to MXG Team, is a risk management platform that provides one of the most comprehensive and cutting-edge 3D slice-and-dice views of risk in the market.

Change
ABN AMRO Bank, headquartered in Amsterdam, is a state-owned bank, which has seen its share of change in recent years: In late 2007 it was acquired, amid significant controversy, by a consortium led by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group. That acquisition was short-lived however; in 2009, following the collapse of Fortis ─ responsible for the acquisition of ABN Amro's Netherlands-based business - the Dutch government nationalized the bank and stabilized it.

The rework involved a redesign and build of the Murex EOD offering, resulting in a significant improvement of processing times ─ overall, processing times were cut by approximately 50 percent, while significant performance gains were also realized.