Misys is focusing on a number of initiatives in several key areas including providing support for central clearing in the OTC markets, enterprise risk management (ERM) and cross asset collateral management, according to Denny Dewnarain, deputy European managing director of Treasury and Capital Markets for the vendor. Following its acquisition of Sophis earlier this year, Misys has also spent time examining specific areas of integration between the solution set it acquired with Sophis and its own offerings, although it is keeping the Sophis set intact.
Dewnarain explains that Misys’ recently launched enhancements to its Summit FT solution are aimed at providing comprehensive trade repository reporting and cross asset collateral and margin management functionality for both OTC and exchange traded derivatives. The new module, which was launched at this year’s Sibos in Toronto, was developed in partnership with MarkitServ and was prompted by client demand for enhanced workflow functionality around clearing and reporting to the new repositories that are springing up in the wake of regulatory reform. Dewnarain notes that data reconciliation and reporting are two key aspects that firms have been struggling with and asking for assistance from their vendors.
He indicates that a “real-time approach” to the middle office has become much more important to financial institutions struggling with high volumes of data, thus the approach that was traditionally considered to be front office specific is now moving further down the STP chain. Real-time pricing, business intelligence analytics and dashboards in order to better manage operational risk are all areas of interest to this community.
Turning to the Sophis acquisition for a second, Misys is also extending its footprint in the buy side community with specific areas of integration between its own stable and that of the acquired party. The clearing component that has been developed within the Misys stable will therefore be tailored for Sophis’ largely buy side clients, and Misys will integrate some of the specific modules within the Sophis solution set into Misys products in order to broaden their asset class coverage. “The focus is on extending the footprint in the equity derivatives and commodities markets,” says Dewnarain.
The vendor is also working towards an October launch of a new enterprise risk management solution. According to Dewnarain, a lot of the “heavy lifting” has been done and it is taking September to ready the offering for launch. The idea is that the platform will coexist with the platforms and solutions a firm already has in place, but will join up the disparate parts of the risk picture in order to achieve ERM functionality. This will pit the vendor against the usual suspects in the space including IBM’s recently acquired Algorithmics and SunGard.
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