Bond Trading System

Customer Profile

Lab49’s client is one of the largest global investment banks in the world.

Business Situation

Our client’s bond traders used a complex software system to do bond pricing, portfolio monitoring, trade execution and risk management. This legacy system was written in a proprietary programming language, and was aging; maintenance and enhancement had become prohibitively expensive and difficult. In addition, pricing of off-the-run bonds was being performed manually, and the client was compelled to introduce support for automating this core business task.

Lab49 was approached to realize the client’s two key strategic requirements:

  • Replace this legacy behemoth with a modern solution built on current technologies and proven design patterns
  • Add support for automated bond pricing strategies



Solution Description

Lab49 started with a clean slate, and devised a component-based architecture built on the Microsoft .NET platform. The new trading application is written in C#/WindowsForms and integrates with the client’s networked systems via XML/SOAP messages and the client’s proprietary pub/sub messaging system.

From the users’ perspective, the Lab49 solution delivers dramatically increased power and ease of use. The application presents a workspace document model, familiar to users of modern productivity software. Window frames are highly configurable and flexible, supporting arbitrary arrangements of documents and panels, as well as persistence of this arrangement across sessions. Traders also benefit from realtime data merging based on user-selectable key-value combination logic, and application robustness is maximized via Lab49’s custom approach to handling service discovery.

Benefits

  • Modern component-based architecture dramatically decreases time-to-market for new application features
  • Numerous workflow enhancements improve bond trader productivity
  • Automated bond pricing is a huge time saver and increases accuracy by a large margin
  • New system built on standard technologies and best-of-breed design patterns