Case Studies - The Financial Sector
As the following case studies show, the financial sector is fertile ground for Grid technology vendors. Financial institutions such as banks, mortgage lenders and insurance companies rely on hefty computations of large data sets, constantly recalculating risks, simulating scenarios and forecasting the investment markets – just the kind of job suited to parallel computing. The solutions employed varies in these success stories, with some, for example Hartford Life, opting for departmental grids, and others, such as CD02, for utility computing. Whatever the type of distributed computing solution chosen, praise of the same benefits of Grid computing such scalability, stability and sheer computational power are a constant theme in the case studies.
Company: AMONG Consortium
Business: Banking
Solution Provider: BEinGRID
Date: December 2009
Anti-Money Laundering in Grid (AMONG) aims to enable better collaboration among financial organizations to improve anti-money-laundering (AML) mechanisms. The technology providers are the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre in the UK and the National Technical University of Athens. Greek IT company Exodus SA is the application provider and service integrator, and Piraeus Bank Group, also from Greece, is the end user.
Please see the Financial grid computing Case Study http://www.it-tude.com/among-case-study.html and http://www.it-tude.com/combatmoney-laundering.html ; or alternatively the financial Pdf case study
Company: Shinhan Bank
Business: Banking
Solution Provider: Oracle 10g
Date: December 2007
Shinhan Bank used a merger with Chohung Bank as an opportunity to undertake a project to upgrade their IT infrastructure. The bank sought to integrate several IT systems they had inherited so to improve efficiency and gain competitive advantage. Their solution was an Oracle 10g technology that provided a stable, scalable, and high-performing environment.
Case Study provided by Oracle
Grid Computing at Shinhan Bank
Business: Finance
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2008
AXA is proposing to its customers new Life Insurance contracts: these products are so called Variable Annuities. The complexity of the pricing and the hedging of such guarantees, which is a new discipline at the frontier between quantitative finance and actuarial sciences, imply the use of very sophisticated modeling techniques and lots of computing resources.
In the pilot, a “gridified” American/Bermudian Monte Carlo approach has been developed to determine the price of the guarantee by taking into account the hidden option to the deferral period. The idea was to choose and adapt to the payoff design a suitable and powerful algorithm to determine the frontier for the optimal exercise.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com
Grid computing at AXA and Fininfo
Company: UniCredit Group
Business: Banking and financial services
Grid technology provider: DataSynapse
Date: May 2007
UniCredit Group is one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in Europe with a network of 7,200 branches and strong local roots in 20 countries. With the passing of new regulations, European banks are now required to establish principles for recognizing and measuring corporate holdings. The regulations also require that banks provide uniformity with how they approach risk management across nations. Faced with these strict compliance deadlines, UniCredit needed a system that could uniquely generate financial figures and perform computations in the least amount of time possible. The company employed DataSynapse GridServer application virtualization software that enabled application services to be distributed and executed across a shared, heterogeneous infrastructure. This "on-demand" environment that dramatically improves application performance, resiliency and uptime.
Case Study provided by`DataSynapse
Grid Computing at UniCredit Group
Company: First Derivatives (Video case)
Business: Technology provider to financial markets
First Derivatives plc. is a specialist provider of products and services to the capital market technology sector. Here, Brian Conlon, CEO, discusses how by combining advanced search capability with grid technology and applying to problems found by banks active in the financial derivatives market they can create competitive advantage to their clients
Grid computing case study provided by: The Grid Stories
Company: Hartford Life
Business: Insurance
Grid technology provider: Condor
Date: February 2005
Insurance company Hartford Life is implementing Grid infrastructures based on Condor to help simulate the markets over a 15-20 year horizon. Grid technologies were chosen based on the criteria of scalability, stability and cost.
Provided by www.loma.org
Grid Computing at Hartford Life
Business: Banking
Grid Solution: BEinGRID
Date: June 2007
Rapid growth of financial markets has increased their complexity and volatility. As a result, over the past decades, investment practices had to adapt to increasingly complex financial instruments and risk scenarios. Today, to face these challenges, financial operators need a whole risk and evaluation infrastructure at their fingertips, which implies systems and data. Grid technologies offer this potential, though difficulties for the integration of Grid technologies in day-to-day business are not trivial. Indeed, building and providing a Grid requires a functioning ecosystem of complementary service and software providers and integrators. It is not possible to go to a store and purchase a Grid.
The proposed solution is the introduction of a new market player, so called Grid Service Company (GSC), offering outsourced Grid services to the financial sector. The GSC offers consulting services on a project basis, for the design, customization and implementation of new Grid-based applications for the financial market; but primarily it offers a Grid service as an Application Service Provider (ASP) using a stand-alone, front-end application accessible through the Internet.
Grid computing case study provided by IT-tude.com
Grid computing at MPS and Finnat
Company: HSBC
Business: Banking: derivatives trading
Date: September 2006
HSBC is standardising and combining its 14 Grid projects to simplify their management. The Grids are predominantly used to aid the derivatives traders, but also increasingly for computing vast amounts of data for regulatory compliance. HSBC found that its Grid teams had a lot in common, but in addition to technical drawbacks, regulatory hurdles such as taxation and restrictions on movement of financial data had to be addressed.
Provided by ComputerWeekly
Company: Anonymous
Business: Large Mortgage Originator
Grid technology provider: Digipede
At a large mortgage originator, one of the biggest in the United States, the quantitative analysts faced a recurring problem: pricing calculations consistently ran longer than overnight, with an average runtime of 17 hours. Following a trial from one analyst with Digipede’s Windows-based grid computing solution on 10 computers, which cut the average runtime down to 2 hours, the company rolled out the Grid system across the entire department, with plans for further uptake in the rest of the organisation.
Provided by Digipede
Grid Computing at a large mortgage originator
Company: Merrill Lynch
Business: Investment banking
Date: January 2007
Merrill Lynch has developed an enterprise computing grid that allows it to run applications 800 times faster than previously by putting to work the power of disaster recovery servers and other under-utilized resources.
Provided by ComputerWeekly
Grid Computing at Merrill Lynch
Company: III Offshore Advisors
Business: Investment Banking
Grid technology provider: Digipede
Date: May 2007
III Offshore Advisors chose a Grid computing solution from Digipede after looking for a better way to fulfil the computational requirements of measuring the risk in their credit derivatives portfolio, dismissing a more powerful computing system due to higher cost and lower flexibility.
Provided by Digipede
Grid Computing at III Offshore Advisors
Company: Genworth
Business: Insurance
Grid technology provider: DataSynapse
Date: June 2005
Genworth is an insurance holding company serving the lifestyle protection, retirement income, investment and mortgage insurance needs of more than 15 million customers. Faced with new compliance and regulatory issues and a realization that legacy technologies were ill-equipped to handle the speed and capacity requirements needed to improve analytic capabilities and bring new products to market faster. To keep up with the exponential demand for computing power, control costs and maintain its competitive advantage, the company adopted an application virtualization strategy. Genworth deployed the scalable, GridServer Virtual Enterprise Edition software from DataSynapse.
Provided by DataSynapse
Company: Anonymous
Business: Investment advisor
Grid technology provider: Digipede
A large investment advisor has built an impressive array of financial engineering applications to drive trading strategies and manage risk. Many of these tools require considerable computing power, so the firm’s staff developed some in-house tools for distributing calculations across a network of 20 servers. However, with increasing demand and the increasing efforts required to manage the internal network, the company turned to Digipede for a Grid solution with more than 40 processors, running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server. Digipede Network."
Provided by Digipede
Grid Computing at an Investment Advisor
Company: BNP Paribas
Business: Banking and financial services
Grid technology provider: DataSynapse
BNP Paribas, active European banking and financial services provider, required more reliable and scalable processing power. The company leveraged its existing resources using DataSynapse’s Grid Server Virtual Enterprise version. This allows them to virtualize data components and business logic found in applications and distributes these services across available system resources as needed, eliminating IT constraints and processing bottlenecks. Result: new business opportunities, reduced cycle times, and enabled greater transaction capacity.
Provided by DataSynapse
