Unibank Goes Live With MKI's Meridian For FX, MM FRAs & Interest Rate Swaps

COPENHAGEN--Denmark's second largest bank, Unibank, went live with Midas-Kapiti International's (MKI) new Meridian middleware and completed data mapping in just three days.

Unibank traders will be using Transact-- it's bespoke front office treasury system-on Meridian middleware to trade foreign exchange, money markets, forward rate agreements and interest rate swaps. Unibank officials decline to say how many traders will be served by the middleware.

Knud Sorensen, Unibank's first vice president who is responsible for IT in the bank's foreign branches, says that Meridian enhanced the bank's straight-through processing (STP) capability and, as an added benefit, offers it the choice of front office products. He also says that, once data mapping has been completed for the PC-based front office, that trades will not be lost in the system.

MKI's Distributed Banking Architecture (DBA) banking systems are in use in all of Unibank's international offices and are maintained at an identical release level, managed by its IT department at its Copenhagen, Denmark headquarters.

Eight international branches of Unibank use MKI products -- New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Singapore plus Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

Though this ensured standard systems configuration and common architecture, the interface between the MKI apps and Transact had to be continually upgraded. As a result, Unibank opted to replace the interface with Meridian.

Meridian is based on IBM's MQSeries messaging software and, with the Midas DBA APIs on the Toolkit version of Meridian, the users undertook their own data mapping and built interfaces between Transact and MKI's banking products. The universal toolkit allows Meridian to be used with a wide array of third-party front-, middle- or back-office systems.

Meridian provides clean pipe engineering for the transfer of data between departmental and core banking systems. This means that there is no need for an intermediate database for filtering or storage of data -- all of these tasks are handled automatically once data mapping has been completed.

Meridian is installed at a number of MKI client sites, including the London branch of Raiffeisen Zentral Bank Osterreich (RZB), Northern Trust in the US and Generale Bank in Hong Kong. Unibank is one of the first customers to go live.

Unibank, in a working group with MKI's middleware development team, completed the data mapping for foreign exchange and money market transactions generated by Transact in three days.

Meridian was then installed on Unibank's Copenhagen test system in four days, after the data mapping was completed. After testing, the Meridian system went live in Unibank's New York office and the software has already been delivered to Unibank's London office. The London branch is managing its own rollout of the new interface, which should take place soon. Singapore will follow in the second quarter.

Unibank has an extensive network of international branches in New York, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Singapore and branch office in Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm. It was established in 1991 from a merger between Andelsbanken/Danesbanken, Privatbanken and Sparekassen SDS Savings Bank.