Financial services
Financial Objects partners with Rabobank
23 July 2008
Rabobank has chosen Financial Objects to jointly develop a new global counterparty credit risk management system. The three-phase project will involve the migration of Rabobank’s own SKY credit risk solution to Microsoft .NET.
Once live, the system will span Rabobank’s global capital markets division with over 1,000 users across the bank’s international network. Users will be able to capture, monitor and report credit exposure, and manage collateral operations against global limits.
Rabobank implemented SKY ten years ago, and since then it has continually developed and enhanced the system’s functionality to support evolving business requirements. It decided to upgrade the entire platform because it was based on legacy technology. Once migrated, SKY will be delivered to users via a Web portal using the latest Microsoft technologies and advanced user interface capabilities.
“Given that we wanted to retain the same level of business functionality available in SKY, a joint development project soon became the obvious choice,” said Simon Calvert, head of risk IT at Rabobank. “We expect to make significant savings compared to the cost of implementing an alternative system from scratch, while retaining what we consider to be superior functionality. By employing Financial Objects’ proven migration methodology and experience we can have a future-proofed system, utilising the latest Microsoft technologies, to significantly reduce our total cost of ownership, in particular the cost of deploying the system to new users and ongoing support costs.”
The new system will provide the core platform on which to build a sophisticated analytics engine to create a comprehensive methodology for calculating potential future exposure (PFE) with an integrated pre-deal checking facility.
Michel van Leeuwen, managing director for worldwide capital markets at Microsoft commented: “This development firmly places both Rabobank and Financial Objects at the forefront of technology applied to credit risk management, and demonstrates the many benefits of utilising Microsoft’s latest Web development platform. We expect this project to set the precedent for credit risk management platforms in the banking industry.”
The first phase of the project will see Financial Objects and Rabobank develop the core platform, and is scheduled to complete in summer 2009. The following phases involve further integration and implementation of the PFE analytics module, as well as the development of the reporting functionality and user interface.
“In today’s volatile credit climate, it’s imperative that banks have a robust and sophisticated credit risk management platform,” said Roland Jones, managing director of the risk management division at Financial Objects. “We believe that Rabobank will be ahead of most in this area as the new version of SKY emerges. This is an important and very timely project for Financial Objects which will take the foundations of our award-winning energycredit solution to deliver a comparable system to credit risk managers in the financial services sector.”