Finastra has been named the winner of the Best OTC Derivatives Trading Solution at the A-Team Group TradingTech Insight Awards Europe 2025. These prestigious annual awards recognise excellence in trading solutions and services, highlighting vendors that deliver outstanding trading infrastructure, technology, and data solutions to capital markets participants across Europe.
Finastra’s OTC Derivatives Trading Solution, Summit, was selected for this award by A-Team Group’s independent expert advisory board, in collaboration with its editorial team.Elena Nicolescu, Director of Product Management, Treasury & Capital Markets at Finastra, who oversees product management for Summit, spoke with TradingTech Insight about how Summit enables firms to address the complex challenges associated with OTC derivatives trading. She highlighted how the solution enhances trading efficiency, improves liquidity management, and optimises risk modelling.
TTI: What are the biggest challenges facing firms trading OTC derivatives today, and how does Summit help them navigate these complexities?
EN: OTC derivatives management is very complex. Most of the times, banks do not find an all-in-one, front-to-risk-to-back solution that answers all their needs, and so they end up having to customize a lot of the functions, or patch together multiple solutions, via clunky interfaces (or no interfaces, just manual feeds).
This leads to a very cumbersome system, difficult to maintain or upgrade, difficult to streamline consistently, leading to ever-increasing cost of ownership.
And players on financial markets are paying the price, risking regulatory reporting mistakes due to desynchronization of their patchwork solutions, or delays due to manual processing. With the new DORA regulations on security, this is bound to become more complex and difficult to manage.Summit is Finastra’s best of breed solution for OTC derivatives. It focuses on providing a comprehensive end to end solution for trade capture, pre-trade limit calculation, valuation and reporting, central clearing, risk measurement and mitigation, all key functions required for proper management of complex instruments. More than that, Summit is flexible: it provides our customers with a no-code toolkit for building products regardless of how complex their trading requirements are. Once the new product is built, Summit guarantees that it follows the standard, streamlined workflows as seamlessly as core products do.
TTI: Given the evolving regulatory landscape for OTC derivatives, how does Summit help firms stay compliant while optimizing risk management?
EN: The regulatory landscape for OTC derivatives is complex and constantly evolving. Firms must navigate various regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) in the EU. These regulations require extensive reporting, central clearing, and risk mitigation measures, which can be resource-intensive.
Summit provides comprehensive regulatory support to help firms comply with regulatory requirements, including collateral margin management and market sensitivity controls. This ensures firms can meet their regulatory obligations efficiently.
Summit offers advanced risk management capabilities, including real-time monitoring of trading positions, market risk, and profit & loss, enabling real-time management of counterparty and market risks.
Summit automates the generation and submission of regulatory reports, reducing the manual effort required and minimizing the risk of errors. In addition, Summit provides a no-code report builder, that allows additional flexibility in getting reporting formats exactly right. This helps firms stay compliant with the latest regulatory changes and reporting standards.
TTI: How does Summit improve trading efficiency for firms dealing with OTC derivatives? Can you share any examples of how automation and straight-through processing (STP) reduce operational friction?
EN: One of our key pillars of Summit roadmap development focuses on operational efficiency and streamlining workflows. Summit automates many operational processes, such as trade capture, real-time confirmations, settlement, and risk monitoring, reducing the need of manual operation within the product. Once a new trade is booked (saved through the UI or imported from trading venues through one of the out-of-the-box interfaces that we provide), the user can be sure it will be picked up in the market risk analysis, STP settlement processing, confirmation, all the way to account posting generation.
Summit integrates seamlessly with other platforms, ensuring smooth workflows across the front, middle, and back office. Its scalable technology platform allows firms to handle large trading volumes and computational-intensive pricing.
TTI: Liquidity and accurate pricing are critical in OTC derivatives trading. How does Summit support firms in managing liquidity and optimising risk modelling?
EN: Summit includes tools to support real-time interest rate and liquidity gap management, allowing firms to manage the exposure created by mismatches between assets and liabilities.
Additionally, Summit offers real-time margining, with margin requirements updated throughout the trading day, and automated margin call workflows.
In terms of risk modeling, Summit provides customizable stress testing scenarios for regulatory and internal risk management. Summit also supports counterparty credit risk management, including CVA and exposure calculations.
TTI: Summit has been a trusted solution in the market for years—how has it evolved to keep up with technological advancements such as cloud, AI, and real-time analytics?
EN: Summit’s evolution has been driven by a commitment to leveraging the latest technological advancements to provide a robust, scalable, and secure platform for its clients.
- Summit has embraced cloud technology by supporting multi-cloud environments and cloud-native technologies. This includes deployment and configuration simplification through containerization with Kubernetes services.
- Summit’s architecture now supports running on any cloud, allowing clients to leverage compute services, and opt for selected Database as a Service options like Azure SQL and Amazon Oracle RDS.
- Summit’s architecture supports dynamic load balancing and failover mechanisms, ensuring that the system remains robust and responsive even under heavy loads.
- In terms of AI, the product team is reviewing 6 use cases, the first of which will be live in March: AI-powered Pre-settlement matching; this use case will leverage the power and speed of AI in the matching process, while still ensuring that the end user has full control over actions initiated in Summit.
TTI: Given that trading firms use multiple systems across the front, middle, and back office, how does Summit integrate with other platforms to ensure seamless workflows?
EN: Summit has always been an open system, historically leveraging etoolkit APIs to allow clients to consume or inject data from other platforms and to support them in their automation and consolidation endeavours.
More recently, Summit’s adoption of RESTAPI has significantly enhanced its openness and flexibility, making it easier for clients to interact with and extend the platform. By providing a standardized and straightforward API architecture, RESTAPI allows for seamless data exposure and consumption from Summit. Clients can now build their own endpoints to support main actions on trades, ensuring that the platform can be tailored to meet specific business needs. Additionally, the integration of an API Gateway brings improved security and load balancing, further enhancing the robustness of the RESTAPI framework
This openness is exemplified by the ability to leverage RESTAPI for digital reporting, enabling Summit trade information to be consolidated and viewed in tools like PowerBI, thus offering users greater flexibility in customizing their data views. Overall, RESTAPI has played a crucial role in modernizing Summit’s technology stack, making it more accessible and adaptable to the evolving needs of customers.
TTI: Can you share any recent client success stories that illustrate how Summit has helped firms gain a competitive edge in OTC derivatives trading?
EN: A global leading investment manager and investment services provider with over 400 billion USD in assets has been a Summit client for over 16 years. They covered their IR derivatives, fixed income, and exchange-traded derivatives (ETDs) business in Summit. A recent win for Summit was the upsell for the Summit Equity derivatives, which convinced the client with its support for a complete list of equity products and management of equity baskets and their constituents. This was a significant win against Murex and further solidified Summit’s position in the market.
A major European bank implemented Summit to streamline its OTC derivatives trading operations. By leveraging Summit’s automation and straight-through processing (STP) capabilities, the bank achieved significant improvements in operational efficiency. The automation of trade capture, confirmation, and settlement processes reduced manual interventions by 30%, allowing the bank to reallocate resources to more strategic activities. Additionally, the real-time risk monitoring and advanced analytics provided by Summit enabled the bank to manage its market and credit risks more effectively, leading to better decision-making and enhanced profitability
TTI: What’s next for Summit? How is Finastra planning to further enhance the platform to meet the future needs of OTC derivatives traders?
EN: Summit has a track record of helping firms gain a competitive edge in OTC derivatives trading by providing customizable investment solutions and supporting the diverse and complex nature of OTC derivatives.
Going forward, we aim to:
- Ensure compliance with regulation and market changes, and leverage as a service solutions to deliver in a timely manner for customers to deploy
- Continue to expand and diversify our support for products out-of-the-box.
- Streamline post trade workflow, through the leverage of API and AI adoption, all ensuring the strict review and control of end users.
- Strengthen our Intraday Analytics offering, by ensuring scalability on the cloud and opening risk analytics so that customers can consolidate risk results easily across enterprise-level portfolios.
- Continue to grow Summit as an Open Platform for Innovation: we already have a cloud compliant solution, we want to unlock further cloud benefits, ensuring we have a scalable solution, and control on security requirements and threat prevention however these may evolve.
- Leverage GenAI to accelerate code modernization, for technical relevance and better quality
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