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Real World Stories

How Can I Best Help My Customer To Succeed?

Global Tier-1 Investment Bank and Leading Derivatives Dealer

One of the World's Largest And Consistently Top-Performing Hedge-Funds

A Big-Three Information Provider

Online Credit Default Swaps (CDS) Execution Platform

A Family of End-Users and Re-Sellers

How Can I Best Help My Customer To Succeed?

Everyone is hoping to succeed.
Most of them have a plan in place.
Only a few make it.

Learning how to be of most help is an art, and it is an art that cannot be practiced until you abandon the notion that there exists a magical alternative to skill and work. If technique and packaged software were all that you needed, success would be a snap and the need for skill and work would evaporate. We know better.

Each project may have similarities, but no two success stories are really the same. The paths vary as circumstances demand. You won’t find us describing the glorious home-run trot of one customer after another: “How did they do it? They bought our software!” We know better.

The repeated use of the same solution is characteristic of second-rate strategy. We are mighty suspicious of what we call “premature solutions”. As a matter of fact, we’re not that crazy about “solution certainty” either. If you fail to properly identify your problem, your solution is guaranteed to be premature. “Is my solution helping or hindering my efforts to solve my problem?” Don’t make it a habit of asking such a question, and you are guilty of solution certainty. We know better.

Our “real world” stories illustrate how we strive to best help customers to succeed. Our experience confirms that individuals welcome and value our approach. By reserving judgment about the best solution, by willingly learning what success means to the customer, and by making source code available, we seem to be able to foster a spirit of shared purpose. With satisfactory tools, curiosity and effort, we find that focusing on the problem allows the solution to suggest itself. The real world doesn’t need any help conjuring up wild variety. We just go along for the ride.

Global Tier-1 Investment Bank and Leading Derivatives Dealer

One of our first customers demonstrates how steady concentration on business problems has yielded subtle and well-aimed solutions. They are a Tier-1 global investment bank and a major derivatives dealer. Originally employing Kapital and Derivatives Studio, our working relationship has adjusted to their needs. Across the years, they have taken measures to react to change. We are happy to have helped things go smoothly.

When they foresaw a need to equip themselves with more customized tools that included those of their own invention, we tapped some Cygnifi veterans to assist in the transition. Detecting a need to do things a bit differently, we actually helped them to substitute their own analytics for those embedded in Derivatives Studio.

Business strategy called for automated cooperation: “Wouldn’t it be nice to share our pricing tools with our trading partners?” As they were observing trends in business and software, they needed help in assessing their options. We advised and answered questions that led to the adoption of browser-based editions of the Cygnifi product line. They made a simultaneous switch in their database architecture and we note with satisfaction that we have helped make these adjustments without disappointment.

Cooperation continues today as we assist in the migration of the Derivatives Studio code from Java to C#. Like the work that has gone before, the effort demonstrates the flexible and transparent nature of our products.

The customer has repeatedly expressed satisfaction at our demonstrated willingness to adjust, to consider minor roles, and to help in ways that might be neglected by larger vendors. We share a common optimism for a future with more of the same.

One of the World's Largest And Consistently Top-Performing Hedge-Funds

A prominent hedge fund wanted to be more confident in their financial modeling. They wanted a tool to exert a higher degree of control over the parameters that feed the models. Since the software was their own, the solution couldn’t be pursued by simply expressing a desire to a vendor. Our existing relationship (they use ALib) encouraged them to look to us.

We helped identify the specific objectives, organized a team, and wrote a system for integration to their environment. Maybe the service was not the kind of thing that you might expect from many vendors. But we were led to the solution by keeping an open mind and concentrating on the business objective.

A Big-Three Information Provider

Sometimes solutions come in the form of subtly different applications of the same tool. It requires a disposition and determination to “find a way to get it done”.

One of the “big three” providers of financial information has grown fond of the ALib product. They make rigorous use of it and found more than one business problem that could be solved with it.

Heavy traffic can tell you things about your tools that you might not want to know. When the quantity and variety of action gets to the levels involved in the large-scale reporting of bond price and yield information, you get to know the strengths and weaknesses of your tools in a hurry. ALib’s strengths have outweighed its weaknesses, and we make speedy adjustments to the library on their behalf whenever an anomalous case arises. Their customer service improves, their tools get better, and that is a pattern that’s worth repeating.

ALib is also their tool of choice to price products for their audience of private clients.

For this client, two distinct business needs are met by the kind of tool that favors the application of skill and work. The confidence that arises from the presence of source code cannot be overstated. Whether grinding through mountains of bonds, or furnishing prices to private clients, ALib has shown one customer that there is always “a way to get it done” .

Online Credit Default Swaps (CDS) Execution Platform

A low-profile adoption of ALib reveals how a good tool complements in a nearly silent way. A customer needed an analytics library with proven virtues. The library must support a highly visible system (no surprises, please), and be tolerant to quick and low-risk enhancement. ALib met the bill and was made the analytic engine for their online trading of credit default swaps (CDS). The CDS execution platform is a big move to add a new customer service, and ALib’s wide acceptance by the credit derivatives community allowed them to build it on a solid foundation.

A Family of End-Users and Re-Sellers

Our experience, our disposition, and our relationships bring us into contact with customers in miscellaneous and sometimes unexpected ways.

As the marketplace uses ALib, it improves. Customers do it. We do it without being specifically engaged. We do it to fulfill a specific customer objective. The flexible and open nature of our business finds expression in the flexible and open nature of the product. Many organizations are pleased with the experience of participating in such a mutually reinforcing process. It is our conviction that the process simply outperforms the alternatives, and with time will become widespread and universal.

• Its Analytic libraries are improved
• It works with Linux™
• It works with C#™
• Its libraries are “thread safe”
• It works with Excel™ “add-in” functions

An education concern in London uses Vizz for classroom instruction of derivative analysts. It’s a nice recommendation for the natural and easy appearance of our products.

Like others with successful tools, we are experiencing a steady rise in the number of requests to resell or embed our products. Check out our strategic alliances for a look at some of the organizations reselling Suite's products within their own offering