Kakapo Technologies provides project management, business, system and technical analysis, design and development services. Kakapo Technologies staff have proven skills across a number of operating systems (Unixes/Windows), languages (C#, Java, Python, Perl, plain English) and technologies.
Consultancy services remains a core focus for Kakapo and Kakapo is delighted to continue to offer them. Additionaly, should you be implementing our industry-leading market risk system, we provide professional services in this regard. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.
Kakapo Technologies has provided a wide range of services. Over a period of more than a decade, a large portfolio of work has been created. The following is a selection.
Fundamental Review of the Trading Book
BIS's Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is currently finalising the Fundamental review of the trading book (FRTB). The FRTB will be the dominant activity on many organisations' market risk agenda for the next few years.
Kakapo has been working through the latest Consultative Document since its release in October 2013, garnering the views of many practitioners working within firms and making the required Kakapo Risk enhancements.
Kakapo Technologies is in an ideal position to provide FRTB-related consultancy in the areas of system capability analysis (your current systems' abilities versus what is required), guided walk-throughs of the Basel document, and the system development and testing services required to bring your systems up to the new framework standard.
Past Projects
Market Risk System Development and Support
Kakapo Technologies has been providing "in-house" development and support services for a large (top 20) bank for a number of years. Services include adding new products, performance tuning and adding features such as a way to integrate externally generated VaR vectors.
Trading/Back Office System Support
Kakapo Technologies has provided ongoing support for a third party "front to back" trading system. This support includes day to day configuration and user support, new product extension and performance tuning.
It has included the preparation and planning for major release upgrades involving thousands of trades plus many add on tasks such as the development of feeds for interest rate swap tear-ups via the triReduce TriOptima service.
Confirmation System
Kakapo Technologies designed and developed a stand alone trade confirmation system for a major bank. The system takes trade information and marries it with centrally held counterparty information to generate and deliver the correct confirmation. The system is still in place and is still supported by Kakapo Technologies staff.
Accounting Rules Engine
Kakapo Technologies designed and developed an Accounting Rules Engine for a major bank. The system takes a set of rules and applies them to a database of trades to create the correct general ledger postings. Trades are made known to the system by intra day feeds from trading systems. An embedded webserver supports user interactions and enquiries. The system supports complex trades across multiple regions and feeds a number of different ledgers.
XML Trade Modelling
Kakapo Technologies was engaged to assist in the design of schemas for the moving of trade and market data internally in a large bank (indeed the resultant work was used to feed the Confirmation Server and Accounting Rules Engine noted above). The trade modelling was based on the FpML standards although large extensions were needed at the time. In addition to the work designing the schemas, work was undertaken to develop adapters to produce the XML for one system.
Reconciliation and Reporting System
Kakapo Technologies designed and developed a very large reconciliation and reporting system for a major bank. The system takes feeds in many different forms from a wide range of systems and performs complex reconciliation (for example matching interest rate swaps to strips of deposits, intra-company derivative trades and trade information to ledger information). The system also prepares complex and detailed accounting reports based on trade information extracted from donor systems. The system numbers some 500 reconciliations and reports.
Market Risk System Topology Reviews and Recommendations
Kakapo Technologies was engaged to conduct a review on the extant market risk systems of a major bank highlighting the issues involved with moving to a new system. Such issues as the number, type and timing of feeds and the significant ancillary uses of the data were to the fore. Past of the brief was to recommend a series of steps that would make system replacement viable by reducing the considerable project execution risk.
In another engagement, a major bank requested that the technical feasibility of a proposed market risk system was assessed. In this case, the assessment suggested that the project should change course or risk suffering significant technical issues during the execution.
Credit Risk System Integration
Kakapo Technologies was engaged to provide the vendor due diligence for a advanced credit risk system. Due diligence required reference site visits plus in depth discussions on technical viability with the concerned vendors. Once the two vendors were confirmed, Kakapo Technologies was integral in the subsequent system integration between a "front end" and "calculation engine".
Market Data History Store and Perturbation Set Generation
Kakapo Technologies designed and developed a system that extracts market data from other systems and stores it making it available for perturbation set generation. The system generates perturbation sets to support Value at Risk (VaR) calculation by a third party system. Additionally the system has a number of sophisticated features that allow users to diagnose errant rates that might generate overstated VaR metrics. The system also has a sophisticated Graphical User Interface and generates time series and current market data credit risk calculations.
Market Data System Interface
Kakapo Technologies has been engaged by a client to build an interface from a well known (and newly implemented) Market Data system to an extant in-house legacy system. A very wide range of market data is involved with some 200,000+ individual items of data being transferred each day. The interface is rule based (using data attributes to deduce the correct mapping) and automatic.