Financial Analytic Software to Redefine the Standards
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Suite LLC delivers a financial analytic library “ALibV3.0™” to financial services organizations including banks, hedge-funds and their suppliers. ALib™ is a set of financial functions for pricing and risk management of Fixed Income Cash products, Fixed Income Derivatives, Credit Derivatives and FX. ALib™ calculates the economic impact of a move in market interest rates or prices – or relative moves – among investments with different durations, so organizations can more effectively protect their assets, meet regulatory obligations and generate alpha.
“What is different about ALib™ is the level of transparency available to each consumer within an organization and the portability which makes it available through the end-user’s technology of choice,” says Gerard Galluscio, founder and CEO of Suite. “For example Finance can understand how a change in market prices impacts the firm’s books, and at the same time, Trading – be it a person or a program – leverages the same underlying business-logic to continuously analyze market opportunities and make trading decisions. Each consumer is able to use the applications that suit them best.”
Ancillary technologies continue to advance rapidly, including new vendors and software in the space of data management and data analytics. Combined with the power of these technologies, the ALib™ Analytic Library brings a rich set of financial analytic “addin” functions to the mix. ALib™ supplies the business intelligence required to utilize that data for risk management and pricing of financial derivatives. “It puts all that data to good use,” states Galluscio.
Flexible yield-curve construction is an important facet of the library and central to many of Suite’s customers’ alpha-generation and risk-management strategies. According to Gerard, accepted methodologies are constantly evolving to price swaps and to gauge the impact of market-price movements on the financial organizations’ assets and liabilities. The continued enrichment of the library to keep up with new conventions is ensured by consistent coding and documentation standards, combined with a unique building block design.
Suite’s analytics are agnostic to the type of database and technology infrastructure their clients work with. Operating systems supported include Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The underlying financial analytics which contain the financial logic are tightly controlled, and fast, as they’re written and maintained in C and C++. An advanced proprietary code-generation tool enables Suite to make ALib™ available through a multitude of program interfaces, such as C#, Java, Python, Excel® and most recently, Matlab®. The diversity of supported platforms has gained Suite clients including industry giants like RBC Capital, Credit Suisse, Putnam Investments, and Thomson Reuters.
“A key factor in our survival for over 14 years is that we can adapt to a changing technology environment without having to re-build the underlying analytics due to changes in ancillary software. Of course the financial analytic methods require development work – moreso since the 2007/8 credit crisis – but re-using the code means we only have to change it in one place. We’ve found that the strategy of reinvesting license revenues into making the product more portable and partnering with other organizations to help us distribute and implement it has been advantageous for us – and for our customers. In the future, we see more partners and alliances, and more adaptation of ALib™ by organizations that want a consistent and transparent analytic infrastructure that they won’t need to rebuild in a few years when their technical environment becomes outdated,” concludes Galluscio.