VWD Eyes Content Pipeline for New Swap Calculator in Market Manager

The improvements in version 4.0 address three main areas raised by user feedback: aesthetics, improved usability and demand for more data. “Clients say, ‘we need this or that exchange, or we would like to add that broker or this calculation’,” says Domingo Santos Marañón, head of product management at VWD. In response, along with the improvements released immediately in the new version, VWD will add end-of-day data from nearly 30 exchanges over the next month. “We plan to add more data in the next month related to the client segment of private banking, treasury and the trading floor, where there is really a demand there for our Market Manager product.”

The new version features a swap calculator, which clients can use to calculate standard interest rate swaps. Users can enter relevant data for fixed or floating positions via several input parameters, and can choose from a list of currencies, select from several day-count conventions, and individually adjust the payment frequency, which is then calculated and displayed in a diagram.

The calculator and functionality is a free add-on to Market Manager, though the datasets required to use it must be purchased from VWD. Currently, the calculator includes data from Tullett Prebon, the European Money Markets Institute and Intercontinental Exchange—subject to ICE’s user fees—though Marañón says the vendor has a pipeline of deals to add more datasets and providers to the calculator in the coming weeks.

“The important thing is that the calculator is able to calculate the different issues—cash flow and so on, the different values that the user wants to put there,” Marañón says. At present, it serves the needs of both corporate treasury clients as well as the banks dealing with corporate treasuries.

The new release also includes enhancements to customer usability and its user interface, including the ability to select display themes, so users can change the complete impression of the product without having to manually alter colors and other aspects of every function, chart and portfolio. “One of the things we try with our releases is to enhance our GUI and make it a little bit more flexible… so the users can work with the product more easily—that’s one of the most important things for us,” he says.

Marañón says VWD has also made improvements to other functionalities, mostly around content integration and the ability to add more datafeeds without having to push out a full product release, so users can receive regular improvements to the platform’s functionality.