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One of Cognizant’s long-time clients, a major global insurer, needed to address an issue with recording and reporting trades between disparate systems. The trading platform used by the insurer’s derivatives traders was not integrated with its global enterprise platform, and the insurer lacked a single source of truth for viewing settled balances in its books and records. The size of each trade and the insurer’s arrangements with trade counterparties meant that reconciliations and reporting had to be faultless—and timely. The insurer asked Cognizant to help, and we saw an opportunity to implement robotic process automation (RPA) to improve the insurer’s efficiency and accuracy.
Cognizant’s scope of work involved automating the daily trade bookings made by each broker from the insurer’s derivatives trading platform to its enterprise system. We designed and developed a virtual assistant using Blue Prism RPA software to run a batch process after the close of trading every day. The virtual assistant pulls XML data from the derivatives trading platform and converts it to .CSV files that feed a roll-up report on all executed and validated contracts into the corresponding simulated transactions in the test environment of the insurer’s enterprise trade recording software.
By automating trade updates from its derivatives trading platform, we helped the insurer simplify reporting, save time and eliminate human error during trade booking reconciliation. Our solution enables the insurer to generate reliable reports and provides an accurate view of the carried value of all settled futures contracts and currency swaps, as well as various types of fixed and floating interest-rate swaps in the enterprise system. This system now supports all the insurer’s books and records. Our solution eliminated manual data processing and cut down the turnaround time (TAT) by more than 60% in recording derivatives trades.
handled daily by the virtual assistant in derivatives trades
increase in efficiency through time-savings in back-office validation and recording
reduction in TAT
accuracy in recording validated futures contracts
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