CLSA: Trade Order Straight-Through Processing

Founded and headquartered in Hong Kong, CLSA is the emerging markets arm of Credit Lyonnais. CLSA is widely recognized as a leader in brokerage and investment banking services in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa. CLSA is consistently recognized as one of the top three firms for research, sales and execution services. Best known for unrivalled research capabilities, CLSA has captured the confidence of institutional investors worldwide.

CLSA has recently received such accolades as Best Brokerage House in Asia from Financeasia and Best Foreign Securities House in China from Euromoney. The firm?s Economics team continuously retains the No.1 position in all major polls including Asiamoney, Institutional Investor and Reuters.

CLSA?s extensive network includes dedicated Asian equity salespeople across the region and in all major financial centers including Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, London, New York, LATAM and Geneva. CLSA has Stock Exchange memberships in Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand as well as local dealing partnerships in Malaysia and Pakistan.

CLSA further enhances its client?s access to Asia?s markets through its support of FIX and providing order routing, real time execution reporting, allocations and Indication-of-Interest functionality.

The Challenge
CLSA continuously seeks to forge deeper relationships with its clients through superior customer service that also reduces risk, and hence cost, of its operations. One way that CLSA hoped to achieve this goal was to offer better service to its clients, by accelerating trade order execution and providing more accurate and timely response to order status inquiries. This meets the constant demand from clients for increased visibility into their orders.

Trade order execution speed also has the benefit of reducing CLSA's risk exposure. The less time that orders remain open, the less likely order cancellation and other adverse events may affect the completion of orders. Reducing risk improves CLSA's bottom line directly.

However, CLSA's legacy trade order management and trade order processing systems were only able to execute and process trades in batch mode. The challenge was further amplified by the large quantity of trade orders coming from all office locations around the world. CLSA needed a solution that could handle the growing trade volume as well as processing trades flawlessly in real time.

The Solution
CLSA used the webMethods integration platform to achieve straight-through processing for trade order execution and processing. CLSA selected webMethods because of the technological elegance of the platform and the company's commitment to the success of CLSA's endeavors.

The webMethods integration platform enabled CLSA to integrate its front office Order Management System (OMS) to its legacy back-office settlement system, Trade Order Processing System (TOPS) and the new settlement system Nova. CLSA's OMS routes orders from its multiple offices around the world and executes them electronically on Asia's regional markets The webMethods platform then moves the trades through to TOPS and Nova for completion of real-time processing. Through this process, CLSA was able to accomplish speed and reliability of trade order execution and confirmation.

webMethods provided assistance with initial architectural design and review. CLSA's IT staff took ownership of the project and brought it across the finish line with some guidance and support from webMethods.

The project took only 12 weeks from start to finish. "We believe we are ahead of schedule in achieving a complete return on investment within the first year," said T. Rajah, Chief Information Officer of CLSA, "additionally, we were able to redeploy many of our trading professionals from manual trade handling tasks to more value added assignments."

Future Plans
CLSA will leverage the success of this initial project throughout its organization. webMethods will provide the integration platform for FIX and SWIFT connectivity for pre- and post-trade order communications replacing and improving CLSA's current infrastructure; while providing connectivity to GSTP and Omgeo virtual matching utilities as they are launched for T+1 trade settlement. "webMethods will provide the integration backbone for CLSA to achieve straight-through processing across the entire organization," said T. Rajah. "We are confident that webMethods will provide even greater demonstrable benefits to our other areas of operations." T. Rajah Chief Information Officer CLSA.