Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards 2008

When developers achieve the distinction of excellence, it is because they have been able to make the intangible tangible to the business. They have been able to illumine just that right bit of technology’s cutting edge so that it makes perfect sense to the organization’s core. Then they have made it happen. Every year there are a few that stand out in this regard: adopting and deploying the best of the new technology, and integrating, extending it, and tailoring it to support the enterprise.

For these impressive achievements, the following five projects have been selected as the winners of this year’s Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards. The awards were handed out at Microsoft’s Sixth Annual Financial Services Developer Conference in New York on March 13.

Home Office Application
MAAKL MUTUAL BERHAD
MAAKL MUTUAL Berhad’s advisor-centric business model means its future is in the hands of its investment professionals who need the right tools to meet the needs of an increasingly Web and investment savvy client base.

The company developed MAAKL Home Office (MHO). Among its components is MAAKL Planners, which helps advisors guide their clients on the best way to allocate their assets in line with their specific investment objectives. It also features a Client Account Management System (CAMS), a mobile office capability with features that include an asset rebalancing tool and unit trust investment reports, enabling advisors to manage and track their clients’ investments anytime, anywhere.

Version 2.0 was rolled out in April 2007. That version offered What-If Analysis, a fund price/index history charting tool, and fund/index comparisons so advisors can track the performance of target funds or indices against various benchmarks. The first stage of Version 3.0 is expected to be launched in July.

The MHO system leverages a range of Microsoft technologies, including aspects of the software firm’s 2008 technology suite. The main components are Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server (VSTS 2008/TFS), .NET 3.x, Windows Mobile 6 and Vista.

The transformative aspect for MAAKL is its switch to a Software + Services (S+S) architecture, essentially a hybrid environment that combines the local in-house software with “cloud” services. In this way, S+S seeks to fuse the architectural strengths of enterprise solutions, the Internet, desktop applications, and mobile devices.

Among the advantages of the new system is a time-weighted rate of return capability that measures the compound growth rate of a portfolio by eliminating distortions resulting from the inflows of new money. As a result, it provides a clearer comparison point for the actual returns a particular fund is achieving over time. And because time-to-market for implementing new functionality will be quicker with the updated technology, the advisors will be able to do more analysis, and communicate information to their clients faster.

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Auditing and Compliance
CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE
When CME and The Chicago Board of Trade merged in 2007 to form CME Group, the world’s largest and most diverse exchange, the company needed a faster, more streamlined way to conduct audits of companies clearing transactions through it, and to share that information among auditors and managers.

It created Castle, a smart client Office Business Application based on Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5. The solution lets auditors work in the familiar interface of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Castle stores auditing information both in a central data repository based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition database software and running on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and on the auditors’ computers, in a database based on SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

SQL Server Replication Services enables fast synchronization between the databases whenever the auditor is connected to the network, ensuring both that the auditor is using the most current data and that other auditors and managers can share and use the auditor’s information.

Auditors use custom controls implemented with Visual Tools for Microsoft Office to add links to supporting documentation to any part of a file. When audit files are moved between the central database and the auditor’s computer, all linked documents and testing documentation move with them automatically. To handle the frequent movement of information between the SQL Server Express Edition database and the Castle application, the developers used the new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) support in .NET Framework 3.5.

“By creating an Office Business Application and using the tools in Visual Studio Team System, we cut 20 percent off the time to develop the Castle audit solution – compared with what it would have taken with Visual Studio 2005 – and included capabilities that we couldn’t have added any other way without a lot of time and effort,” says Roman Benko, associate director of systems development for CME Group.

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Global Underwriting Solution
BANK OF AMERICA
After more than a decade of mergers, consolidations, and process changes Bank of America relied on a plethora of disparate systems supporting the Global Commercial Banking, Dealer Financial Services, Global Wealth and Investment Management and GCIB Credit Services divisions. Global Commercial Banking associates, for instance, had to interact with a myriad of systems when analyzing each credit request.

Bank of America required an innovative and scalable solution that would integrate and reduce the various credit systems into a well-governed value chain supporting the underwriting needs of multiple lines of business and a globally distributed user base.

The Global Underwriting Solution (GUS) is a 100 percent Microsoft-based solution developed using Visual Studio 2005, .NET and Microsoft Server technology. A .NET Smart Client, Infragistics NetAdvantage, Microsoft Communicator and Microsoft Office 2007 provide a responsive and flexible user experience allowing end users to perform tasks in a free-form manner and prescriptive business workflows. The solution employs Web services, ILOG business rules engine, and high fidelity deal document generation and editing using Microsoft Word. Finally, GUS leverages a distributed farm of Microsoft Windows 2003 IIS servers, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases, and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for data integration, storage, and Web services for business resilience.

GUS significantly improves and standardizes the underwriting process, adherence to regulatory compliance, and operational competence while allowing for a high degree of process customization per line of business. In 2007, GUS reduced the Total Cost of Application by $1.288 million with a revenue improvement of $7.6 million and a cost savings of $4.1 million.

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ALM Framework
MERRILL LYNCH
Merrill Lynch has done something new with its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) framework. Its innovative “Process Framework” not only takes full advantage of Microsoft’s latest tools – Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) – for their strengths, but also increased the range of coverage and depth of integration – two key aspects for a successful ALM implementation.

Using WIX 1.0.1, Merrill Lynch developed a new tool (WixGen) that seamlessly produces Windows Installers (MSIs) fully automatically for standard product-types. This means, for example, instead of spending days to manually write WISE templates that produce MSIs for each Web service component, the developers are able to generate a fully automated MSI in minutes.

Using the functionality of Visual TFS, Merrill Lynch created a “universal build type,” with any product-buildout being “a derived class” of this. It developed a number of custom tasks to accomplish a wide range of activities specific to the company’s custom tags with pre- and post-activities. This enabled product builds to be reduced to checking appropriate features rather than spending a day or two to produce the builds per product. Additionally, Merrill Lynch has integrated a tool called MetaDB that houses all the product profiler Metadata, and uses it for promoting products throughout the application lifecycle stages such as development, integration, quality assurance, and production.

Kumar Vadaparty, director at Merrill Lynch’s Global Wealth Management Technology (GWMT) division, explains the Process Framework. “Classic VSTS/TFS implementation of ALM would have us focus primarily only till code completion; we broadened the range considerably and streamlined the process substantially to include build, package and deployment.”

Tooling is complemented with process guidance. To reach its hundreds of developers within GWMT and then to integrate into the firm’s SDLC initiative, the team needed to address three main development methodologies – IBM Rational Unified Process, Microsoft Solutions Framework and the agile methodology SCRUM.

“We developed a common ‘process interface’ in terms of artifact standardization, which we then mapped to different methodologies. This way, our process framework is more extensible. For example, if we want to add XP, it would be a mapping exercise, not a rollout exercise for the core team. This level of streamlining helped us pilot to about 20 teams with the resources we initially targeted for about 4 or 5 teams,” says Vadaparty.

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International eBanking Platform
PIRAEUS BANK
Piraeus Bank wanted to extend the success it has had with its advanced Internet and mobile banking solution to all the countries where it has and will have a presence. For that it needed to implement an advanced multi-country, multi-channel eBanking platform hosted centrally in one location, in Piraeus Bank’s datacenter in Athens, Greece.

Piraeus’ Electronic Banking division developed a custom solution called Winbank International built on Microsoft’s ALM Framework Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008. It used TeamPlain Web Access as a Web interface for Microsoft Team Foundation Server that allows for the managing of work items, shared documents, reports and source control repositories. Piraeus chose Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as the database engine with Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its server platform providing enterprise content management and form services capabilities. ASP.NET based interfaces, enhanced with AJAX capabilities, support multiple channels such as Web banking, mobile banking, and Web ATMs. Its Performant application services layer utilizes Windows Communication Foundation with its security and extensive configurability advantages and LINQ.

The team also developed an innovative administration tool called International Admin that allows operators in each bank to securely register and administrate their electronic banking customers. Such functionality requires maximum security, scalability and interoperability and support of various user roles ranging from a bank’s customers to internal operators such as branches’ staff and the call center’s agents.

The result was a new international platform with a common electronic system for all banks within the Piraeus Group. The platform features a common administration tool, a common transactional system, a common tool for reports and statistics, and common authentication & authorization mechanisms. The platform provides for a unified customer experience across borders with management in the hands of one IT team.