AtomFX for Sales Desks

Case Study — Santander AtomFX (PDF)

Banco Santander, S.A. (also known as Santander Group) is the largest bank in Spain, operating globally with presence across the Globe, covering 30+ countries with a workforce of over 200,000 staff. Within the United Kingdom, Santander Corporate & Investment Banking (SCIB) offer their clients a range of services and products covering global markets, corporate finance, and global debt financing. Santander and Caplin have worked together since 2014.

Problem

Santander had a requirement to re-engineer their Sales Trader Workflow (STW) tool, and were able to do so by leveraging existing Caplin data streaming components and integration adapters already deployed at Santander. The STW is targeted for global use by FX Sales Desks within Santander serving clients in the SME, Corporate and Institutional space.

Below are the drivers behind the requested technology changes:

• There were a number of outstanding regulatory requirements that needed to be implemented within a specific time period.

• It was costly and difficult to incorporate new functionalities onto the existing platform.

• Santander wanted a solution that was future-proofed for ongoing enhancements.

• Sales staff wanted to access client information and analytics within a single view - to assist in pricing and executing trades on behalf of their clients, as well as subsequent post trade events.

• The Sales application was also to be used by internal trading desks for trade execution, and so needed to incorporate specific additional functionality.

Solution

To support their global Sales teams, Santander chose to leverage the Caplin FX Sales offering that provides fast, intuitive client search, contextual decision support and on-the-fly sales margin. This enabled Santander to be able to:

• Get a replacement solution to market in a short period of time.

• Take advantage of an ongoing roadmap of improvements to Caplin’s FX Sales product.

• Have the flexibility to enhance the application with custom development using their own development team.

Project

As part of any engagement Caplin looks to set out clear goals and success criteria for the project. These were defined as follows:

Functional goals:

• Allow global FX Sales Desks to price and execute FX trades on behalf of their clients

• Support FX Spot/Forwards/Swaps/NDF/NDS/Time Options/Strips/ParForwards

• Allow Sales to comply with regulatory pre-deal checks and timestamping requirements

• Allow Sales to manually input trades after voice/chat pricing/execution

• Allow global Trading Desks to execute trades against eFX prices

• Provide Sales dealers with relevant information about client behaviour and activity as part of a dashboard view

Non-functional goals:

• An outstanding user experience

• Utilise and extend the already deployed and integrated Caplin platform to provide the required sales workflows with minimal time to market

• Provide the ability to customise Caplin FX Sales in-house and extend in the future if necessary

• Provide a unified architecture for all FX systems

Results and future plans

Santander continues to roll out the application to all their global regions, and works closely with Caplin on regional-specific requirements as they arise. Owing to the nature of Caplin’s roadmap methodology, Santander enjoys the benefits of ongoing feature additions and enhancements. The next initiative is to work together on refining the sales dashboard looking to provide further insights and recommendations to sales dealers on client trading activity.