Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Sumitomo Trust & Banking Live on Calypso's FX Solution
STB explored several options to satisfy its FX business strategy, provide more effective customer service , and improve operational efficiency . Calypso was selected as it was a single system providing complete STP through settlement, which would allow STB to improve the efficiency of its FX processing . To help STB achieve its service goals , the system now has various features including trust FX, bulk entry of trades, rollover and allocation of trades, and margin control and limit management. To ensure that the system met Japanese market requirements, Calypso partnered with STB to complete support for Japanese market requirements.
A spokesperson for Sumitomo Trust & Banking, says: “Calypso has supplied us with a single platform for both interbank and customer FX trading, with supporting functionalities for both the front office and back office. We have now enhanced the infrastructure of our FX business with an automated system, built on modern technology, and have an opportunity to improve the efficiency of the FX business. This is our first step using the Calypso system to enhance our business infrastructure, and we are expecting further improvements to meet our business strategy goals and to provide better service to our clients.”
“In a market where margins have become very tight, banks need to be able to provide end to end connectivity for its customers to offer better customer service. They need to connect to liquidity providers, portals and banks. This is achieved by providing banks with a single platform to support the connectivity. In addition it reduces their need to use many systems which increases the potential for operational risk and higher maintenance costs. We have built a robust platform for the entire FX process which leverages all Calypso’s technology benefits,” said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Rand Merchant Bank Goes Live on Calypso
RMB sees Calypso as the right technology platform for the bank to support future business growth.
"Calypso fits well into the RMB technical architecture. Written in Java and designed for flexibility and customization it gives us a solid financial framework to work from,” said John Murray – RMB Technical Architect.
“The implementation of Calypso provides us with better control and enhanced efficiency, allowing us to support our current and future business needs in a cost effective manner,” added Wendy Donaldson – RMB, Treasury Operations.
RMB is Calypso’s first client in South Africa.
“RMB is well known for innovation in South Africa, which makes them an ideal partner for us to work with. We are looking forward to building our relationship further with them,” said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso.
About Rand Merchant Bank
Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) is the investment banking arm of FirstRand, one of South Africa’s largest, publicly quoted financial services groups. RMB is a full-service investment bank with offices in South Africa, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Mauritius and Australia. RMB has enjoyed uninterrupted profit growth since its formation in 1977. Independent surveys consistently rank it first in corporate finance, structured finance, private equity and as the leading debt house in South Africa.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Calypso Launches Enhanced FX Module to Provide Complete Automation from Client to Settlement
“With e-commerce initiatives driving down spreads in FX markets, banks are faced with the challenge of maintaining strong customer relationships to drive their business growth, while having to drastically reduce costs in their operations,” says Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso.
Calypso’s FX solution is a single system supporting client management, sales, multichannel pricing and deal capture, interbank trading and back office capabilities. A new web based client interface, WebFX, allows clients to enter trades via the internet. The system also provides connectivity to EBS, Reuters 3000, portals such as FX Connect, and liquidity providers. Other added features include customer service tools such as bulk entry and pricing of client trades and trade allocations.
Volume growth is supported downstream by Calypso’s award winning back office. The highly scalable back office, in use at banks such as HSBC and Dresdner, is completely integrated with the sales and trading capabilities of the system. The solution supports numerous messaging standards and actively assists in reducing operational risk with its exception based workflow processing. The Calypso system ensures that as business grows, banks will have a modern robust platform to execute the volume of trades.
Marston comments, “Innovation in the FX markets has come in the form of distribution. Banks can drive more sales through the e-commerce channels now available. While multibank portals have specialized in client distribution and traditional vendors have focused on interbank trading, Calypso’s approach is to streamline the entire process, by which crucial costs can be removed. We have looked at the FX business holistically and designed our system for automation with corresponding scalability.”
The FX module enables FX and FX options to be traded in a single system and is part of Calypso’s total, multi-asset solution, which consolidates all treasury, derivatives and securities products on a single technology platform.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
TD Securities Picks Calypso for Credit Derivatives
The solution will be rolled out to support trading activities in London, Toronto and New York as well as all risk and back office processing.
About TD Bank Financial Group
Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with more than 51,000 employees in offices around the world, The TD Bank Financial Group (TDBFG), offers a full range of financial instruments and services to approximately 13 million customers worldwide. TD Bank Financial Group had more than CDN$274 billion in assets. TD Bank Financial Group ranks as one of the top on-line financial services providers in the world with more than 4.5 million on-line customers. The TD Bank Financial Group (TDBFG) trades on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges under the symbol "TD".
Monday, September 6, 2004
NewSmith Capital Partners Selects Calypso
NewSmith has licensed the Calypso system for cross asset coverage and is in the process of implementing the system for its Credit and Fixed Income funds. Nick Senn at NewSmith Capital says; "We conducted extensive research before choosing Calypso. Calypso clearly stood out as the market leader for Credit Derivatives and we feel comfortable that Calypso will provide us with a cutting edge technology - which will allow us to better service our clients."
NewSmith joins a growing number of hedge funds that will be using Calypso as their trading platform.
Wachovia Expands Calypso use to Energy Derivatives
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Citigroup Goes Live with Calypso for Credit Derivatives Technology
The key goals of the new implementation are to provide increased controls, straight through processing, and on demand risk to the business and support the bank's growing volumes and new product innovations. With Calypso, Citigroup will be able to significantly enhance time to market for new credit products, scale its credit derivatives business and get faster risk results globally. The single front office system covers trade capture, pricing and risk, while providing real-time scenario analysis and P&L information across the business.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Calypso Selected by Suntrust for Derivatives Trading
About SunTrust
SunTrust Banks Inc., headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, is one of the nation's largest commercial banking operations. As of June 30, 2004, SunTrust had total assets of $128.1 billion and total deposits of $85.5 billion. The company operates through an extensive distribution network primarily in Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia, and the District of Columbia and also serves customers in selected markets nationally. Its primary business include deposit, credit, trust and investment services. Through various subsidiaries the company provides credit cards, mortgage banking, insurance , brokerage and capital markets services. Visit SunTrust at http://www.suntrust.com/.
Monday, July 19, 2004
LCH. Clearnet to Use Calypso
About LCH Clearnet
LCH. Clearnet is the leading independent CCP group in Europe, serving major international exchanges and platforms, equity markets, exchange-traded derivatives markets, energy markets, the interbank interest rate swaps market and the majority of the Euro-denominated and sterling bond and repo markets. It aims to serve as a catalyst for further CCP consolidation in Europe.
With a major global reach, the corporate vision for LCH. Clearnet is to become the partner of choice for CCPs and international markets around the world.
Monday, July 5, 2004
Calypso Becomes First Trading System to Integrate Mark-It RED
Calypso is a leading provider of credit derivatives trading and risk management technology to the world’s largest financial institutions. The integration allows data from RED, which has been adopted as the market standard for reference data in the credit markets, to be incorporated directly into Calypso’s system, giving users the ability to place trades using the standardized reference entities and reference obligations.
Mas Nakachi, Senior Business Analyst at Calypso, said, ”Having access to accurate reference entity data is a major challenge in the credit derivatives markets today. Mark-it RED is invaluable in providing the transparency and consistency that firms require to conduct their business accurately and efficiently. This integration is an important enhancement for Calypso and our mutual clients will gain tremendously from this joint initiative.”
Penny Davenport, Director of Mark-it RED, said, “We are able to leverage Calypso’s strong technology framework to incorporate RED so that trading desks can benefit greatly from the direct access to Mark-it’s standardized reference entity and reference obligation data. Firms are looking for seamless, integrated solutions for their credit trading businesses and the partnership between Calypso and RED provides exactly that.”
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Calypso Wins The Banker Technology Award for Second Consecutive Year
“Calypso’s back office application continues to set the standard for systems, both in terms of technology and functionality. Calypso’s clients are able to realize real gains from the system, which was key in our consideration of all the candidates. Calypso takes a fresh approach to the challenges faced by operations teams and continues to enhance its application to eliminate the users pain points. Calypso is only one of two repeat winners of our technology awards and we commend them highly for this achievement,” said Parveen Bansal, Technology Editor for The Banker.
“With the innovation in the financial markets today, operational infrastructure has become more strategic in nature. Leading banks cannot afford to have their back office systems restrict their ability to grow the business. In addition to providing cost efficiencies, a back office must be scalable and flexible. We built Calypso’s back office application to serve as a platform for growth for our clients, and are very pleased to be recognized for our efforts” said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology.
About The Financial Times Business Group
Financial Times Business is part of the Financial Times and Pearson Plc. Established in 1926, The Banker provides global financial intelligence to the international banking and finance community. Published monthly, each issue delivers news and opinion on the latest developments in both the retail and investment banking sectors. With regular software and technology updates, new product innovations, country profiles and expert market commentary from leading industry figures, The Banker is essential reading for all banking and finance professionals.
Friday, June 4, 2004
Calypso Launches Enhanced Credit Derivatives Trading Solution
Calypso’s technology provides an integrated view of pricing and risk and allows banks to increase credit derivative trading volumes and monitor positions. Calypso 7.0 can be scaled to manage the significant volume of market data unique to trading credit instruments and supports the complexity of structuring and trading hybrid products. Calypso’s front-to-back platform enables straight through processing (STP) of trades and better management of workflow between traders, sales and the back office. The integration of credit derivatives functionality with Calypso’s leading cross-asset platform allows traders to hedge credit derivatives against other instruments, such as fixed income products.
Calypso 7.0 supports a range of credit derivatives products, including:
- Hybrids
- Index and Basket Trades (including Tranched Index Products) - Traders can capture a trade and calculate exposure to the continually changing basket of underlying names.
- Resecuritisations – including CDO Squared.
- Synthetic, Managed and Static CDOs
- Swaps – including Single Name Credit Default Swaps, ‘Nth’ Default Swaps, Asset Swaps and Total Return Swaps.
“Fuelled by continuous innovation, credit derivatives are the most dynamic instruments in finance today and banks are seeing significant profitability in this area,” says Charles Marston , CEO, Calypso. “The market has grown so rapidly and to such volumes that existing systems have come under strain and market players are recognising the need for trading technology specifically designed to support these complex products. The credit derivatives market has seen significant growth over the past year alone and will only continue to accelerate. We are committed to providing out-of-the-box technology that is flexible enough to react to market changes and adapt to new trading instruments and are excited about the launch of Calypso v7.0.”
Additional system enhancements include integrated front office functionality to support FX trading and back office support for US fixed income products.
Monday, December 1, 2003
Wells Fargo Selects Calypso for Interest Rate Derivatives Business
"We explored a variety of options for the new system, including vendor offerings and building a solution in-house. We found that Calypso had rich functionality that would serve our business needs well and give us a fast time to market," said Adrian Kayari, Head of Financial Products at Wells Fargo. "The ability to consolidate a significant number of stand alone applications into a single turn-key trading platform should improve our productivity, and enable us to take our business to the next level, both in terms of trade volume and sophistication."
Technology and support also played an important role in the system selection.
"Calypso has a strong technology platform that can handle special requirements well - for example, the ability to integrate our own analytics is a key benefit. We also evaluated the company's support processes carefully and feel confident that we will get support of a high quality from Calypso," added Kayari.
"We are excited about Wells Fargo joining us as a customer," said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso. "They are well known for their focus on innovation in technology. Their selection of Calypso as the technology vendor for a key business validates our efforts in building the right system for the market."
About Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company is a diversified financial services company with $391 billion in assets, providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance from more than 5,900 stores and the Internet (wellsfargo.com) across North America and elsewhere internationally. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. is the only "Aaa"-rated bank in the United States.
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
HSBC Extends Calypso Usage to Equity Derivatives
"Calypso has given us faster time to market. We were live on the first equity derivative product within 9 months of the decision," said Sandeep Saksena, Head of Derivatives and FX IT at HSBC Bank USA. "We expect to move all our equity derivatives business to Calypso by the end of this year."
Cost reduction was another factor in HSBC's decision.
"Given the success of the credit derivatives project, we wanted to expand our use of Calypso," added Saksena. "Using one system to process multiple products saves us money. Our support costs are reduced, and our team can focus on more value added activities."
HSBC joins a growing list of existing Calypso customers expanding their use of the system.
"We are pleased HSBC has extended its use of Calypso. It is a measure of their confidence in the product," said Kishore Bopardikar, President of Calypso Technology. "It is a simple formula for success: satisfied, long-term clients."
HSBC Bank USA
About HSBC Bank USA has more than 410 branches in New York State, giving it the most extensive branch network in New York. The bank also has eight branches in Florida, two in Pennsylvania, three in California and 17 in Panama. HSBC Bank USA is the tenth largest US commercial bank ranked by assets and is a subsidiary of HSBC USA Inc, an indirectly-held, wholly-owned subsidiary of HSBC Holdings plc (NYSE: HBC). Headquartered in London, and with over 7,000 offices in 81 countries and territories, the HSBC Group is one of the world's leading banking and financial services organizations. For more information about HSBC Bank USA and its products and services visit http://www.us.hsbc.com/.
Monday, July 7, 2003
Wachovia Goes Live on Calypso for Credit Derivatives
"Our credit derivatives business is growing," said Joe Belciglio, Managing Director, Trading Technology. "With higher volumes come new systems requirements. Calypso enables us to enter deals quickly, and ensures that our systems capabilities grow as our business does. Their system makes it easy to manage the huge amount of static and market data dealing with issuers, issues, default probabilities, recovery rates and correlations between them."
"The Calypso system supports both vanilla and complex credit products," continued Belciglio. "Moreover, we can extend the system ourselves to handle new products. That flexibility is essential in a rapidly evolving market such as credit derivatives."
"Wachovia's use of Calypso in this area validates the strength of our credit derivatives offering," said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso. "We were able to sign several large clients within a few months of launching the product - a sign that our product satisfies unmet needs in the market."
About Wachovia Corporation
Wachovia Corporation (NYSE:WB), created through the September 1, 2001, merger of First Union and Wachovia, had assets of $348 billion and stockholders' equity of $32 billion at March 31, 2003. Wachovia is a leading provider of financial services to retail, brokerage and corporate customers throughout the East Coast and the nation. The company operates full-service banking offices under the First Union and Wachovia names in 11 East Coast states and Washington, D.C., and offers full-service brokerage with offices in 48 of the 50 states. Global services are provided through more than 30 international offices. Online banking and brokerage products and services are available through wachovia.com.
Wednesday, June 4, 2003
Calypso Wins Overall Technology Leader Award from The Banker
"The judging panel chose Calypso as it clearly differentiated itself from the pack. The winner was based on a number of criteria. True innovation, adaptability to business needs, fast implementation, and customer satisfaction were all considered. Our panel felt Calypso distinguished itself on all fronts," said Parveen Bansal, Technology Editor for The Banker.
"To be recognized as the overall leader in this category brings great satisfaction. We set out to build the leading cross asset front to back trading system in the industry. While we continue to enhance our application to meet the changing needs of the industry, this award validates our efforts, " said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology.
Calypso received the award at The Banker Technology Awards 2003 evening on June 3 in London.
About Financial Times Business
Financial Times Business is part of the Financial Times and Pearson Plc. Established in 1926, The Banker provides global financial intelligence to the international banking and finance community. Published monthly, each issue delivers news and opinion on the latest developments in both the retail and investment banking sectors. With regular software and technology updates, new product innovations, country profiles and expert market commentary from leading industry figures, The Banker is essential reading for all banking and finance professionals.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Calypso Announces Support for Linux
Supporting Linux is an integral part of Calypso's strategy to provide the lowest total cost of ownership to its customers.
"Calypso is focused on lowering its clients overall costs. We look at all the elements that go into this. Our system provides clients with greater STP which reduces operational expenses. Customers have been able to eliminate the costs of maintaining multiple systems by using Calypso. By supporting Linux, we are now providing them with the least expensive option for them to deploy and operate critical business applications like Calypso." Said Kishore Bopardikar, President of Calypso.
Calypso's ability to run on Linux makes it an attractive system choice for banks adopting a modern system strategy but unable to find appropriate applications for use.
"Many banks now have an open source plan and are adopting Linux. They would like to use it more widely but are restricted by applications that were built for a single platform and cannot be migrated over to Linux. With the support of Linux we are simply addressing our customers needs," commented Bopardikar.
Calypso's support for Linux was very straightforward as the system is built completely in Java. No additional development was required and the same version system is now available for all platforms including Linux, Windows, Solaris and others. Testing on Linux is integral part of the development process at Calypso. Calypso itself uses Linux to run its system in house in various instances.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
DataSynapse Partners with Calypso Technology to Scale Front/Middle-office Analytics and Decision Support
Calypso is a modern, front-to-back trading system with broad support for asset classes and business functionality. DataSynapse's guaranteed grid computing platform, LiveCluster, enables clients to meet the workload of hundreds of traders, risk managers, and IT professionals in a real-time environment without incurring additional hardware, development, or support costs.
The announced integration will permit calculations within Calypso to be performed faster by distributing them over a network of computers via LiveCluster. This applies equally to client proprietary analytics integrated into Calypso with their open application programming interfaces (APIs). These proprietary analytics are then automatically available for distribution via LiveCluster without modification. Calypso and LiveCluster are written entirely in the Java programming language and integrate seamlessly in a client's architecture.
"Our partnership with DataSynapse benefits all concerned," said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology. "Good decisions depend on timely information, but the analytics of trading and risk have become more complex and compute intensive. Our clients can speed up these calculations using grid computing via LiveCluster."
"Calypso is the market leader for cross-asset trading and processing systems," said Peter Lee, CEO of DataSynapse. "Our joint success with Calypso validates our partnering strategy with leading financial application software providers."
Calypso and DataSynapse expect to work together with several financial institutions, as they did with Wachovia.
"The combination of Calypso's STP framework with DataSynapse's grid computing has had a significant impact on our fixed income derivatives area over the past two years," said Andy Cook, Director, U.S. Dollar Derivatives, Wachovia Corp. "We evaluated several alternatives. Calypso and DataSynapse gave us the fastest implementation. This year we will trade over $1 billion in fixed income and related capital markets products using Calypso and DataSynapse, and we plan to extend our use of their integrated solution."
"Implementing complex models over large portfolios while still maintaining adequate levels of performance to facilitate trading is a major challenge throughout the financial services industry." said Debbie Williams, Group Vice President, Capital Markets and Corporate Banking, Financial Insights (formerly Meridien Research). "End user applications are increasingly dependent on the layers of software and hardware to facilitate this performance. It will take partnerships like this one between DataSynapse and Calypso to make these processes run smoothly."
About DataSynapse
DataSynapse, Inc. (http://www.datasynapse.com/) enables applications requiring scalability to exploit distributed computing capabilities by efficiently utilizing the overall IT environment. DataSynapse deploys a self-managed, guaranteed, distributed computing platform, LiveCluster, that delivers order of magnitude increases in the speed and reliability of software applications while substantially reducing clients' total cost of ownership and accelerating their time-to-deploy. LiveCluster solves compute- and data-intensive bottlenecks and scalability constraints by unobtrusively harnessing the power of servers, clusters and/or desktops anywhere on a client's network, whether dedicated or underutilized. LiveCluster integrates easily with new or legacy applications running on Linux, Unix, or Windows systems. DataSynapse is headquartered in New York, with offices in London, Houston, Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco.
Monday, February 3, 2003
The Royal Bank of Scotland, Financial Markets to Provide Global Capital Markets Operations Processing on Calypso System
The Royal Bank of Scotland is the fifth largest bank globally by market capitalization and has a significant Capital Markets business. Capital Markets originates, trades and researches vanilla and structured debt capital securities across a range of asset classes, industry sectors, maturities and currencies across the credit spectrum, from Gilts and Euro-government Bonds to High Yield Bonds.
"We looked for a system that would deliver core functionality 'out of the box' whilst also providing us with the potential to develop functionality using a toolkit. This will enable us to support any business expansion and improve STP in a cost effective manner " said David Hefford, Global Head of Risk and Operations Technology at RBS Financial Markets. "Calypso addressed most of our requirements out of the box and will be extending the product according to our specifications".
RBS wants to deliver a scalable solution to support the Capital Markets business and also integrate with the strategic application architecture across Financial Markets.
"We are developing a processing infrastructure that will serve Financial Markets well into the future," added Hefford. "Calypso has the technical features to be a core component of the processing infrastructure for Capital Markets business and fits in well with our technical architecture.
The initial project is planned to go live in the second half of 2003. Calypso will eventually process the full range of Capital Markets products that RBS Financial Markets trades, from Gilts and Euro-government bonds to high-yield.
"We are excited about working with The Royal Bank of Scotland," said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology. "We see this as the start of a long partnership. It is through relationships like this that we have built our growing presence in the market."
About The Royal Bank of Scotland Group
The Royal Bank of Scotland is a broadly based financial services group with operations spanning clearing banking, corporate banking, financial services, investment management and insurance, both in the UK and overseas. It is the second largest in bank in Europe and the fifth largest banking group in the world by market capitalisation. The Group serves over 18 million customers. Through its Financial Markets division it provides specialist services in global foreign exchange, currency and structured derivatives, money markets, together with a wide range of interest rate management services to The Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest international corporate and institutional client base. For further information, please visit http://www.rbsmarkets.com/
Monday, November 4, 2002
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein chooses Calypso for securities processing
The project as a whole covers the bank’s cash equities and bonds businesses as well as its securities lending and borrowing operations, all of which fall within DrKW’s Capital Markets business line. The project will be delivered jointly by DrKW’s IT and Operations departments.
“Cost reduction through consolidating systems infrastructure onto more efficient processing platforms is a major goal of the project,” said Mark Dovaston, Managing Director, Information Technology at DrKW. “Once implemented, Calypso will also reduce both the number of exceptions and the cost of processing those that occur.”
“We are confident that the new technology will help improve our processes and flexibility, delivering benefits not only to us as an organisation but also, critically, to our clients ” added Nigel Whitehouse, Global Head of Operations.
Calypso provides real-time information on positions, collateral, margin calls, upcoming settlements, and fails to Operations staff, who can then in turn support the front office more effectively. The software aims to help the financial industry solve problems of cost control, ensure more effective trading, and streamline operations through IT innovation.
“DrKW Frankfurt already uses Calypso for FX and money markets. We are delighted that the success there has led them to extend the product to the global securities business,” said Charles Marston, CEO of Calypso Technology.
About Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the investment bank within the Corporates and Markets Division of Dresdner Bank AG, a member of the Allianz Group since July 2001. Headquartered in London, Frankfurt and New York and with an international network of offices, DrKW provides a wide range of investment bank products and services to European and international clients through its Investment Banking, and Capital Markets business lines.