UOB Case Study
Faster Access to Global FX Market With Chronicle’s Buy and Build Solution
About
A leading bank in Asia, UOB’s head office is in Singapore, with a strong regional presence across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Beyond Asia Pacific, UOB’s global footprint covers offices in 19 countries and territories in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America.
About
A leading bank in Asia, UOB’s head office is in Singapore, with a strong regional presence across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Beyond Asia Pacific, UOB’s global footprint covers offices in 19 countries and territories in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America.
CHALLENGE
Navigating the Competitive Landscape of FX Trading
With trillions of dollars transacted daily, the global foreign exchange industry is both huge and highly competitive. Maintaining a competitive edge – and a profitable foreign exchange (FX) business – requires significant and continuing investment in leading-edge technology and trading infrastructure, and effective hedging and pricing strategies.
As a leading regional FX player committed to supporting Singapore’s ambition to establish the country as a major EFX regional hub, UOB sought to upgrade its EFX capabilities. Specifically, UOB wanted to replace an incumbent, third-party EFX solution because it could not deliver the latency and performance required, and making changes to it was a slow and costly process.
At the same time, UOB recognised it needed to transition to co-lo, to improve its latency and response times.
SOLUTION
Chronicle's Buy and Build: Combining Off the Shelf Software with Custom Functionality
Following an extensive evaluation of three market-leading and competitive solutions, UOB selected Chronicle Software.
UOB’s rigorous evaluation was not focused solely on performance. While assured high availability and low latency were imperative, UOB’s competitive evaluation also considered other factors such as speed of implementation, the deployment of defect-free components, and robust testing capability for new features.
Recognising the potentially enormous cost and impact of delays (and bugs) in software implementations, Chronicle gave UOB complete flexibility with respect to changing, testing, and deploying its solution. Chronicle’s solution satisfied UOB’s requirements with respect to performance, time to market, service reliability, and ease of deployment.
Deliverables
UOB leveraged the power of Chronicle’s software stack to deliver a cutting-edge solution for its FX pricing and trade engine. In just 7 months, the system was deployed to production. The system included off-the-shelf modules from Chronicle EFX, Chronicle FIX adapters for upstream and downstream connectivity, and components custom-built by UOB, with Chronicle’s help and advice, using Chronicle Services for custom pricing, hedging etc.
Moreover, UOB was able to tap into Chronicle’s expertise in assembling the solution, allowing them to take advantage of best practices learnt from other similar systems. To guarantee continuous availability, the solution was configured with a 2+1 High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) setup, providing redundancy and resilience.
RESULTS
Elevated FX Trading with Chronicle
Having chosen Chronicle in a competitive tender, UOB’s solution was designed and deployed in 7 months, on time and on budget. The effective combination of Chronicle technology and expert consultancy enabled UOB to replace a third-party service provider with a high performance, low-latency EFX solution at a cost an order of magnitude lower than comparative EFX solutions.
- Chronicle FIX enables UOB to support customers’ FX flows more quickly and efficiently.
- Co-location connectivity and reduced system latency improve price discovery and enhance UOB’s pricing capabilities; in turn customers in ASEAN, and globally, benefit from access to more competitive FX rates.
- Very positive feedback from UOB business users on system performance and stability.
Products Used
Chronicle Tune is software that automatically configures your OS for optimal performance based on our knowledge and expertise.
A FIX Engine with high availability and microsecond latency, utilised for upstream and downstream connectivity.
A framework for developing event-driven architecture/microservices for custom pricing, hedging and algo strategies.