Times Bank Of India Implements STP Through Panorama/Devon Combination

LONDON--Times Bank of Mumbai, India will implement straight through processing (STP) and integrated portfolio risk management for its treasury operations via Infinity's Panorama and the Devon System.

Times Bank is expanding its range of services to private and retail customers and the subsequent increase in daily volume in foreign exchange and money market transactions meant that it needed a front-to-back office platform that could manage risk. A total of 16 positions will be supported by the Panorama/Devon combination--nine traders, two middle office and five back office, says Narayan Gopalakrishnan, project manager for Times Bank.

Panorama is Infinity's enterprise solution for market, credit and operational risk. The Devon System is a modular, open technology solution providing integrated support for trading, managing and administering derivatives, also from Infinity, which is part of Sungard. The Devon System will provide back office trade processing at the bank.

Over the next four months, Times Bank will implement Panorama, version 98.1, and the Devon System, version 3.34, as an integrated front-to-back office system, supporting FX, money market, bond and swap instruments. Once the project is complete, Times Bank's treasury group will be expanding their support to certificates of deposit, commercial papers, treasury bills, interest rate swaps, repos, FX swaps, FX forwards and FX spots.

Panorama will provide trade capture, real-time position keeping, limits reporting, market risk management and credit risk management. The bank's risk management group will first implement historical Value-at-Risk (VaR), back test parametric VaR, then move on to Monte Carlo-based VaR reporting.

Gopalakrishnan says that the bank considered a number of other trade capture and risk management applications from Reuters, Summit Systems, MKI and FNX. The bank was swayed by Infinity due to its ability to enhance STP, handle portfolio risk management and extensible instrument coverage. Also, Infinity's out-of-the-box products are intended to reduce development time, he says.

Until recently, the bank was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bennett Coleman Group, a newspaper company.