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Calypso has been waging an aggressive battle to win clients from established trading and risk systems such as Misys Summit.
The contest began in earnest in 2001 when HSBC chose the Calypso Trading and Risk Management Platform as the processing system for its global treasury markets and securities trading operations. HSBC is also a big Summit user, which makes Calypsos win significant. The same year, Dresdner, First Union, and a subsidiary of Socit Gnrale also adopted Calypso. Then in 2002, ING decided to consolidate its back-office processing using Calypso. Since then, Calypso has won customers ranging from Citigroup to Wells Fargo; The Royal Bank of Scotland to Wachovia. In fact, the company now counts seven of the top ten global banks amongst its 15,000 users.
Meanwhile, Misys has been building
steadily on its 15 years of market experience with Summit, a proven multiasset class platform. Summit has a huge global installed base, which it continues to develop in Asia and the Far East. Being a big player in capital markets, treasury and banking, Summit has attracted heavyweight banking customers such as Lloyds TSB, Commerzbank, Bank of Ireland and Deutsche Bank - which boasts one of the first global rollouts of Summit. However, Calypso is giving Summit a good run for its money. Banking technology experts have lauded its flexible, Java-based framework, its speed of implementation, and lower-costs in comparison with competing systems. Both Summit and Calypso have attracted some of the top IT consultants in the world, and they have become world experts in their fields at implementing and tailoring the two IT platforms for different banks. In this white paper, we ask four leading experts, all of whom are Cititec Consultants, whether Summit has reached its pinnacle, and if Calypso is poised to dance away with its customers. Our experts discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of Calypso and Summit, as we look to the future of the two trading systems.
Contents:
Calypso: Fighting Fit. Summit: The Peak of Success. Conclusion: Summit or Calypso?
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these things add to the package of Calypso. Calypso is the answer for certain institutions such as ING and some hedge funds who are convinced when they see how rich Calypso is, and that it also does commodities, futures, and the whole suite of financial products. In my opinion, Calypso is expanding far more quickly than Misys in terms of gaining more new clients.
Flexible Friend
Paul Marshall is Calypso Project Manager for Rabobank and has a team of 12 Calypso experts. He has been working with Calypso for three years on various projects. His most recent project is to implement Calypso for Rabobanks front office, specifically for credit derivatives, fixed income and portfolio management. Calypsos real strength is that it has got a very flexible data model, said Paul. When you put in your own bespoke information, it automatically proliferates throughout the system. This means you only have to put in your data attributes once. He added that Rabobank has integrated its own pricing models, which shows how modular Calypso is. Even though I am doing a front office implementation, Calypsos strengths are also in the back office, and the flexibility of workflow. You can turn it into a complete exception-based tool, with automated processing, except when something doesnt conform. Plus its all graphical so business analysts can use it. But despite stealing a march on more established systems - such as Summit - our experts said that Calypso also has its drawbacks. We will look at some of these in the next section.
Taking Control
Another of Calypsos strengths is that it can allow traders to take more control of their trades using the front end software, said Andrew, who is a former bond trader. With Calypso traders can create their own exotic instruments and plug in their own prices and market volatility. Added enrichment comes from being able to pull dynamic data into Calypso for example Bloomberg feeds, said Andrew. Calypso has dedicated SWIFT clearing interfaces and Bloomberg feeds all out of the box, which Summit doesnt. All
Calypsos Strengths:
1. 2. 3. Calypso is Java-based which is appealing to IT departments This also makes it more flexible to develop and extend Calypsos strengths are in parallel processing, integration and workflow
Calypsos Weaknesses
1. Java has its drawbacks, being a relatively new programming technology Banks may have to invest heavily to extend and hone their Calypso system Applications produce a large number of pages which irritates traders and end users
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the software wasnt refined because no one else was using it yet. After we implemented, tested and ran the software, it was working well and delivered a good solution for Bank of Ireland, Dev concluded. Manoj Mistry is another leading expert on Summit, and was involved in one of the first global rollouts of Summit, at Deutsche Bank. He said, Summit is very powerful and completely extendable. In most banks, the people who are making the decisions dont fully appreciate how extendable it is. As a result, business managers do not always recruit the right level of expertise when it comes to extending their Summit systems, and this could be considered a
spread across the user contingent, said Manoj, who had to win back hearts and minds.
Summits Strengths
1. Summit has a longer track record than Calypso and well established services It is extremely powerful and is strong from front to back, and across asset classes Summit is highly customisable and extendable with the right expertise
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shortcoming of the system: to get the most out of it, you need to hire the best.
Summits Shortcomings
Unlike the Java-based Calypso, Summit is Unix and Windows-based, and can be more complex to develop, with longer lead times, said our experts. Manoj argued that Summit is very powerful, and has a uniform way of extending it if you know what youre doing. But it can also be complex. Summit is a complicated system, and you need good Unix, database and infrastructure people. But because its also a very comprehensive system, you can use it for heavy duty capacity processing. It is ideally suited to investment banks, or corporations with treasury departments that need to capture and record derivatives data for hedging purposes. But Manoj added, I wouldnt recommend it to smaller organisations, as it is not a retail system. Another issue that Manoj has experienced is that the Summit front end has irritated end users in the past, though the vendor has worked hard to make it more graphical and user friendly, with more recent updates of the software. In one instance, some of the credit derivative traders at Deutsche Bank took a dislike to the interface and developed a negative mindset towards Summit, which
Summits Weaknesses
1. Summit is Unix and Windows-based and can be more complex to develop than Calypso The platform is suited to certain types of organisations but not others Misys tends to follow the curve in bringing new enhancements to Summit
2. 3.