Portfolio Masonry Boxed

New Payments Platform (NPP) processing engine design – International Software Vendor

Problem

An international software vendor specializing in payments processing solutions was experiencing difficulties in delivery of their NPP Payments Engine for which they had already signed up some major Australian banks. The program was running behind schedule and had ongoing quality issues due to design defects.

 

Approach

Poseidon undertook wing to wing health check of the program. Once review was completed the findings were validated with the management, gaps were filled and rectification measures implemented to bring the program back on track.

Review results indicated design isses as the root cause. Based on the findings and analysis, Poseidon undertook the re-design of the NPP Payments Engine. Additional recommendations and rectifications also included streamlining the business analysis practices and tools used as well, improvement in project governance and closer alignment with the company’s own framework for design of Payments solutions.

 

Outcome

The re-design not only aligned the solution to the vendors own proprietary framework ensuring product sustainability but also helped avoid liquidated damages and adverse publicity.

Portfolio Optimization Tool – Dutch pension fund

Context
Request was received from a Dutch Pension fund for a bespoke solution for Portfolio Optimization. Upon undertaking a consulting assessment it was discovered that there were other issues with the Portfolio Optimization process such as use of multiple spreadsheets, absence of transactional data master and multiple manual processes which not only resulted in errors but rework and a long lead time for responding to the market developments.

 

Solution
A bottom up approach involving redesign of information and application architecture was undertaken decommissioning the spreadsheets and consolidating the various data sources into a single repository along with synchronization and automated scheduling of data transformation and loading. The tool runs on top of the consolidated architecture and uses the heuristics of Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and Genetic Algorithm to arrive at the optimal profitable portfolio.

 

Result
The bespoke Portfolio Optimization solution enables the portfolio managers to arrive at the most profitable portfolio while meeting all business constraints.

The redesigned architecture has resulted in operational savings of Euro 375,000.00 per year due to :

  • Elimination of manual processes and errors
  • Elimination of rework
  • Improving the processing time
  • Enabling the portfolio managers to continuously implement enhancements to the calculation algorithms