top of page
Finance Sector Case Study
Credit Suisse

Assisting with a software update and implementing legacy components

The Business Challenge

The Titan Service Team works within the credit risk team which is responsible for creating, maintaining and supporting their integrated calculation environment, consisting of their distributed calculation, risk and trade engines, market data and feed generation components. The software manages a wide variety of fixed-income and derivative businesses including credit derivative, longevity market and mortgage derivatives.

The prime objective of the system is the creation of comprehensive end-of-day, intra-day and real-time risk analysis to support strategic trading and risk management. They required an agile team, consisting of a Business Analyst, Technical Architect, Developers and Testers. The key deliverable was to develop the Titan Software, infrastructure and design, and implement various legacy components used within Credit Suisse.

The system needed to support older databases, that needed to be updated to C# 4.0/.NET 4.0 (server side), and utilise a new messaging system. We were required to work within these various layers and constraints and obtain approval by their Technical Design Authorities to implement the required solution.

Our Solution

Whilst Credit Suisse provided internal User Research and had a large set of Epics gathered from internal stakeholders, our Business Analyst focused on helping users achieve the best outcome. The Business Analyst, together with the Technical Architect, helped define the user stories, which were of a very technical nature. This allowed them to design the best infrastructure with a view to reuse existing components, whilst minimising the need to build new components only when necessary. Together with advanced testing techniques (behaviour Driven Development), the testers could create auto-acceptance tests that would allow the developers to build only the functionality needed in order to pass the test. This reduced code waste and made sure that the system always complied with acceptance criteria. We were innovative to reimagine business processes as necessary, delivering increased value to candidates and positive experiences for users. We mentored other development teams in the company and held 'brown bag sessions' where we shared lessons learned and coding techniques. We introduced pair programming and other agile techniques.

Image by Glenn Carstens-Peters
Results

The Titan Service is currently running and has reduced the number of errors previously in the system. By using the cloud, the service is running at a much lower cost. The system has been updated to the latest versions of .NET and is more maintainable, scalable and less dependant on third-party suppliers, not to mention that it's much easier to find resources to maintain the system. Previous legacy systems, such as the underwriting systems, were very slow to work with and used old desktop user interfaces to accept user input. The Titan Service is more secure and allows one place for users to login.

bottom of page