Client Profile

Global investment bank.

Project

Development of a back office securities settlement system for a leading investment bank to replace a legacy system.

Business Drivers

• The legacy system was reaching capacity and was forecast not to be able to meet demand within a year.
• The client took the decision to go for a green field development.
• The new system needed to take inputs from, and produce outputs for, a number of the client’s existing systems, including Securities Management and a number of front office systems used by the traders.

Timescales

The project has a lifespan of 2 years. The new system will run in parallel with the legacy system 6 months into production, with outputs from both systems compared to ensure accuracy.

Team

Scott Logic have 1 project manager (part time) and 5 developers working on the new system. This is in addition to the client’s 5 developers, 1 architect and 1 project manager based in London.

Technologies

J2EE (incl. EJB3, JMS), JAXB, XML, JMX, JGroups, JBoss, DB2

Work undertaken by Scott Logic

Design and implementation of crucial components. See below:

• Message kit – a component used extensively, translating messages from varying formats into internal Java Objects.
• Internal framework – worked extensively on the internal persistency layer and business objects (EJB).
• Reconciliation – responsible for comparing outputs from the old and new system, implementing rules and raising trade exceptions. Outputs can exceed gigabytes in size and performance is key to ensuring swift resolution of issues.
• Testing – implemented a system test framework for the system core. Also included a single click deployment and smoke test to ensure seamless releases.
• UML designs – all designs produced by Scott Logic are done using UML2.0. We are able to quickly interpret and produce designs to ensure quick turnarounds.

Challenges

• Performance; going from 800k activities per day to handling 10M activities. A lot of time is spent analysing code to ensure maximum efficiency and testing to ensure accuracy.
• Supporting the legacy system; parallel running makes it essential that full support is given not only to new message formats, but also to old, with the mapping issues which subsequently arise.

Results

The project has been in progress for 6 months, and the new system is currently running in parallel with the legacy system. The reconciliation system produced by Scott Logic is proving invaluable for the testing process; end of day files are compared well within the NFRs, and detailed reports are available to highlight potential issues.