SOLUTION SPOTLIGHT

Latest Release of Adaptiv Exposed

"Overall the 2008.1 release is a significant step forward in meeting our long-term goals for stable, high performance and feature-rich solutions to the enterprise risk and OTC derivatives processing industry." Mat Newman, Head of Product Management, SunGard Adaptiv.

The 2008.1 version of the Adaptiv suite of products was made available for general release on 23rd July. A culmination of over 9 months of specification, development and testing, the release is another step in our ongoing strategy of investment in quality, performance and innovation. A requirements gathering process took input from our existing client base through individual visits, interaction with the professional services team and user group meetings. This input, combined with a number strategic projects help to ensure the longevity and appropriateness of our offerings.

Adaptiv 360

Addressing specific client feedback for the Adaptiv 360 product we have added functionality in several key areas:

• We have enhanced the integration with external engines such as Adaptiv Analytics and Reech, improving calibration and the ability of more reports to use these engines. This integration also enables us to offer broader product coverage within the system by leveraging the extensive investments made in Adaptiv Analytics.
• Trade Administration has been made more complete and comprehensive and we have added specific product coverage as requested by the client base.
• Looking to the future we have tested the release on 64-bit operating systems and on Windows Vista. This will help as our clients grow their operations with ever-increasing portfolio sizes and consequential risk calculation demands.

Adaptiv Analytics

Adaptiv Analytics, the valuation and portfolio risk calculation engine which drives our market and credit risk calculations, has also benefited from several new innovations:

• A new calibration framework has been implemented to simplify and unify the process of calibrating the stochastic factor models of market prices and rates, thereby simplifying the day-to-day operation of the system. This framework is accessible via web-services calls or the AA Studio user interface. In addition, the calibration framework has been populated with a library of calibration calculations which cover all of the SunGard base models.
• In terms of product coverage we have added several new native models in the rates, equity, FX and commodity areas. A full list is available from your SunGard client services contact.
• More generic product coverage extensions include MtM Reset containers which can be used to generate variations of standard products with these features.
• A Numerical Pricing engine has been combined with our extensibility framework to allow scripting of Equity, FX and Commodity derivatives. The derivative structure is described intuitively (in a similar manner to scripting solutions) in any .NET language. Strikingly, this simple representation is used both to price the structure at forward time horizons and also age the structure through realised paths for long horizon PFE simulation. Uniquely, no extra burden is placed on the implementer to support ageing.

Adaptiv Credit Risk

The introduction of new global limit views will allow users to navigate complete sets of utilisation and limit data rather than having to examine individual counterparties one at a time. These new data structures should enable customers to realise time-saving benefits by simplifying routine analysis across multiple customer groups. In addition, further work has been done to integrate Adaptiv Collateral and Adaptiv Analytics into the Adaptiv Credit Risk web-based architecture, giving customers utlising multiple products improved operational savings.

Adaptiv Operations

We have continued to enrich our support for documentation generation, cash flow notification and processing, and accounting (Trade and Hedge) processing. One of the major enhancements for the documentation solution was integration with Sungard Kiodex to provide ISDA style document production for OTC Commodity Derivatives. This utilises web services technology to bring confirmation generation and management to enhance the Kiodex risk workbench solution. Further improvements include using Adaptiv Documentation for SWIFT validation and production.

This adds the following benefits over the existing custom message interface (CMI) solution:

• Ability to add additional messages without coding expertise
• Ability to add optional fields to existing messages without coding expertise
• Consolidated viewer for both Freeform and SWIFT documents
• Custom multi-level approvals for all document types including SWIFT
• Acknowledgement message processing from SWIFT

Elsewhere the document template manager has been enhanced for greater flexibility and control allowing more complex document templates to be created and managed with less effort.

New KPI dashboards

A major strategic investment that we are making to improve the management of your operations is the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) dashboard. KPIs are the metrics deployed by operations users to measure and determine whether your operations are running smoothly and there are no bottlenecks or potential issues. The first stage of this development provides a prototype that allows the metrics to be provided in graphical format as charts, gauges and tables on predefined dashboards.

Examples of KPIs are exceptions or errors for all modules, confirmations still awaiting matching with the counterparty, settlements awaiting approval (split by approval group) plus many more.