The Japanese banking giant has deployed the Orchestrade platform from Orchestrade Financial Systems for its London branch.
Mizuho Bank in London has implemented a consolidated trading and risk management platform that will allow the bank to have a consistent view of P&L and risk in near real-time via an open application programming interface (API) framework.
The bank has replaced a legacy system that could not support current volumes and risk requirements with the Orchestrade system for consolidated risk management that will support a variety of asset classes, officials say. The platform from Orchestrade Financial Systems was up and running in less than nine months, and encompasses front-to- back office trading and risk management. The local implementation got underway at the start of this year.
“It was clear from the onset that Orchestrade offered everything we needed in terms of product coverage and risk management capabilities,” says David Blake, managing director, head of market and liquidity risk management at Mizuho Bank, in a prepared statement. “In the end, Orchestrade delivered on all fronts. The quality and speed of the implementation has exceeded our expectations, and we view Orchestrade as a strategic part of our trading and risk IT going forward.”
The system implementation from selection to going live in production was accomplished in nine months “on schedule and within budget,” officials say.
“As with many large financial institutions, Mizuho generates and maintains its trading and risk data in multiple systems. This disparate approach creates challenges to producing consolidated views of risk that are consistent and fast enough to keep up with the business and regulatory requirements,” according to a statement from Orchestrade.
The benefits for the bank via the implementation have been:
- A reduction in time spent in manual processing and reconciliation;
- Lower running costs through operational simplification and automation;
- And increased flexibility in representing risk measures to different businesses and front office users
Mizuho officials picked Orchestrade after “an extensive review of other third-party systems as well as internal build,” officials say.
“We are extremely proud to add Mizuho to our growing list of global bank clients,” says Gordon Chan, vice president for marketing at Orchestrade, in a prepared statement.
The Orchestrade platform is being targeted at financial services firms that “do not want to go through a costly rip-and-replace strategy covering several legacy systems,” Chan says. The Orchestrade solution that is intended to “meet immediate regulatory and risk reporting requirements, with the added potential to replace entire legacy front office or back office systems in the medium or longer term.”
The Tokyo-based Mizuho group is a global financial services firm with offices in nearly 40 countries, approximately 60,000 employees, and assets of more than $1.8 trillion, according to bank officials.
The Mizuho businesses offer services for retail banking, corporate finance, investment banking, asset management, capital markets, and sales and trading.
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