Rabobank TakesXeno TimeScape for Risk

Rabobank has gone live with London-based data management software vendor Xenomorph's TimeScape database, officials tell Inside Market Data.

The bank's global market risk department began using the product, which includes the new SpreadSheet Inside function, last month. TimeScape is capturing intraday, tick and historical data as part of Rabobank's risk management process. It has been implemented in the bank's Utrecht, Amsterdam and London offices at two or three positions, says Frits van de Kamp, manager of risk team at Rabobank International.

Rabobank previously used an internally-built database to store this data, which was exported into Microsoft Excel, after which a third system ran the numbers to get the appropriate reports, van de Kamp says.

"There used to be poor quality levels of market data because the old databases were difficult to access for the users in the department at the time," he says. "TimeScape is used to create greater transparency in market data quality as well as offering users greater flexibility accessing the market data."

The goal behind the implementation includes simplifying existing processes. "The larger strategy is that there will be one point of entry and one central database for all our market data and issues that will then go through the disseminator into… the different departments," van de Kamp says. "I want to standardize as much as possible all the reporting [and] centralize all the reporting and the point of contact for disseminating market data-related items, which is in TimeScape."

According to van de Kamp, the SpreadSheet Inside function allows users to select categories of closing prices and then generate reports on them. "You can be interested in the closed prices of the equities but then you might also be interested in the closed prices of the foreign exchange or in interest rates, bond prices or hedge funds," he says.

SpreadSheet Inside is part of TimeScape XDB, the high performance database technology within the TimeScape product (IMD, Dec. 12, 2005). Other functions within TimeScape include data viewing, editing and charting; administration of databases, groups and users; creation of curves and spread curves as well as baskets and custom indices; holiday table editing and viewing; building artificially/proxy instrument histories; history validation; curve/spread curve validation; and instrument pricing and pricing model management. TimeScape also allows customers to enter public holidays and different currencies. A Web builder report is currently in development.

Brian Sentance, marketing director at Xenomorph, says SpreadSheet Inside was developed with Rabobank and is designed to simplify the manipulation of data within a spreadsheet environment.

Van de Kamp says the bank particularly wanted SpreadSheet Inside to have its own query language. Rabobank displayed its reports in a certain layout and Xenomorph helped create the appropriate setup with the appropriate layouts such as headers and footers, he says. "They also helped us to get familiar with the query language," he adds.

He says there are no plans at the moment to expand the rollout.

Sentance declines to name the other four clients that have signed for the service. He also declines to comment on the pricing structure.

TimeScape covers multiple asset classes, including equity, equity derivatives, fixed income, fixed income derivatives, credit derivatives, convertible bonds, commodities and structured products.