Consulting & Implementation

Partnering with Clients:

O3 partners with clients to implement the requirements of their capital market applications and systems. Services range from requirements analysis, design, development, implementation, integration, customization, testing and pre / post production support. We have a long and successful track record at major Tier 1 / Tier 2 Banks, Corporate Treasuries, Investment Management firms and Insurance market participants.

Examples where O3 partnered with clients to deliver significant value:

1. A major European Bank rolled out a third party trading application to manage its global interest rate derivatives business. It was a complex implementation spanning a large volume of assets covering a full set of functionality from the front office straight through to the back office and other downstream systems on a global basis.
2. A major Financial Institution needed to migrate from its current trading systems version which was several years old to a new current vendor based version. The solution was integrated with a third party real time deal capture system as well as corporate data warehouse and downstream general ledger system to create a holistic end to end trading environment.
3. The merger of two Regional Banks required consolidation of trading systems to a unified platform. O3 consultants managed the merger, testing and production rollout of the new platform under tight timeframes and budgetary control.
4. A major Global Investment Management Firm was migrating two disparate derivative trading systems database instances to a single internally supported environment merging the data into a uniform normalize single instance
5. A US based Bank with global operations was introducing a new asset class to the market requiring additional functionality be integrated into a comprehensive front to back office trading platform.
6. A large US based Financial Institution required the automation of FAS accounting and hedge effectiveness be integrated into their existing system to produce a straight through solution and comprehensive reporting capabilities.

System Implementation:

System Implementation from an O3 perspective can be summarized as making a financial system or component thereof available to a prepared set of users (the deployment community), in line with a defined set of requirements, data, deliverables, tasks and resources on time -- on budget, across the full Software Development Lifecycle.

Having led dozens of successful implementation engagements, our process is highly structured to ensure effective implementation. Systems set-up and configuration projects depend on the extensive planning, execution and follow-up, an approach we’ve developed over the years, including:

• Proven Iterative Methodology
• Strong Up-Front Analysis, Planning and Design
• Mature Implementation Plan Adjusted Jointly with the Client
• Deliver Early, Build Confidence, Enforce User Participation
• Get the Client Team UP the Learning Curve ASAP

O3's implementation builds on deep experience, ensuring that a client's technology infrastructure is optimized in a way that no one software vendor can deliver. As a client advocate, our implementation decisions are driven by the client's implementation objectives, which may at times be different than a vendor’s objectives.

O3 leverages existing documentation and conversion tools from our prior successful implementations, including functional test plans, data conversion tools, interface extracts and workflow analyses.

Implementation Phases:

1. Project Analysis and Planning
2. Systems Validation
3. Detailed Requirements and Specifications
4. Development
5. Component and Integration Testing
6. User Acceptance Testing
7. Phased Deployment to Production

Gap Analysis is an important part of every implementation assisting in the identification of necessary enhancements, workarounds and customizations and enables better planning for the implementation. Our goal is to ensure that the client's implementation is conducted efficiently, accurately and completely across the complete application lifecycle.

During this process, the current state of the application is compared and contrasted with the future state business and technical requirements to determine where potential gaps may exist. The analysis helps determine the factors that are required to reach the target state, and then determine how to fill the "gaps" between the two states.

Customization & Integration:

Integration and Customization of financial and trading applications, whether with third party vendors or in house proprietary solutions often requires additional customization or development to ensure the systems meet business and technical requirements. This especially applies if the functionality requirements are not available “out of the box”.

O3’s experienced development team is well positioned to assist our clients in developing application enhancements and interfaces to extend their systems deployment. Whether a client requires customization of existing capabilities or integration into other applications, our domain experience and understanding of the underlying business and technologies enables us to facilitate the best solution for their organization.

Typical engagements include:

• Work with internal teams to develop an integration and customization strategy
• Design and develop proof of concept prototypes
• Design and develop new interfaces into the existing applications to reduce training requirements, improve ROI, and increase end-user adoption
• Develop custom front-end or back-end software solutions to enhance performance of the solution

Data Management:

With financial firms facing a regulatory onslaught and Dodd-Frank touching virtually every financial services business line while stressing increased financial transparency and risk management reporting, the pressure to rationalize financial data across business units today is greater than ever.

Providing improved data management capabilities across the enterprise without breaking the IT budget is the key to meeting this challenge. Data needs to be treated as a strategic asset that can be used as a trusted source of information throughout the enterprise and managed throughout its entire lifecycle. This requires a comprehensive approach to data driving all downstream processes.

O3 experts focus in several key service areas to assure our clients' data management will always be accurate and efficiently processed and controlled. These areas include:

• Data Governance
• Data Quality
• Data Architecture
• Data Standards
• Data Security

Our initiatives strive to create accurate, consistent and transparent data content emphasizing data precision, granularity and meaning, concentrated on how the content is integrated into business applications as well as how it is passed along from one business process to another.