A simple approach was envisaged by the London branch management. Using terminal emulation technology, a PC connected to the banks LAN would collect details of each deal from front office systems and operate the existing terminal interface. This would mean that the business rules would be applied to deals virtually the moment they were made, effectively addressing the risks of over-exposure and unauthorised trading.

Like many good ideas, it wasn't quite as easy as the bank thought …

Some deals originated in the back office, and these also had to be captured without double counting those that had already been collected from the dealing room. Meanwhile, deals could be reversed at any stage. The bank staff were not able to envisage how they would need to interact with the system.

The system had to be resilient to failure of any of the input and output routes, and report on the actions taken. The terminal interface was proprietary, obsolete and undocumented. With our extensive technical and business background, our team were able to tackle these difficulties within a fixed price discipline. There were three stages, the first addressing the technical feasibility, the second establishing a working system.

Finally, once this showed what was possible, the operational requirements were resolved in the third stage.

The result
The system was initially installed on a trial basis, but it was quickly seen to be an effective solution and fundamentally soundly engineered. Within a few weeks it had become a critical part of the IT process. The Datafeed did four years service at three international sites.

When the replacement systems were implemented, the bank found that it did not provide the same level of service as the Datafeed with the old system. Our team re-engineered the Datafeed on the new technology, also upgrading to new PC technology.