CONNECT

Settlement Operations System Consolidation Project

Client: A Hong Kong local bank

Duration: Apr-16 to Feb-17 (11-months)

Position & Role Played: Lead Architect

Background:

The Hong Kong local bank initiated a strategic plan to implement the Calypso Back Office system, aiming to establish a consolidated settlement operations framework for various treasury and investment products.

The objective of this implementation was to align the Settlement Operations Department with industry best practices by adopting the Calypso Back Office system. This approach enabled the re-engineering of workflows and processes, emphasizing streamlined operations and enhanced efficiency. The overarching goals included workflow optimization and report rationalization, with the ultimate aim of delivering increased value to the bank through cost-effective and well-organized operations. This initiative was driven by the necessity to address several pain points:

  1. Phasing out the existing settlement system, with the vendor discontinuing support and maintenance.
  2. Inadequate support for crucial functions in the existing system, such as backdated revaluation entries posting and handling various investment products like Repo, Credit Link Notes, and amortization IRS.
  3. Heavy manual workload associated with the Bank’s Start of Day (SOD) operations, including manual confirmation of bonds and IR derivatives, manual updating of credit ratings in bond data, and manual General Ledger (GL) posting for equities and FX derivatives.
  4. Prolonged lead time for report delivery and data quality issues in reports.
  5. High exposure to operational risks and potential financial losses associated with the existing settlement system.
My Contribution:

I played the Lead Architect and Technical Lead role to help the client and project team with

  1. Design, Refinement, and Optimization of New Settlement System: Orchestrated the comprehensive design, fine-tuning, and optimization efforts for the newly implemented settlement system.
  2. Technical Problem Resolution Advisory: Provided strategic guidance and resolutions for technical challenges, ensuring smooth implementation and operation of the system.
  3. Integration Inventory Design for Over 20+ Bank Systems: Developed the integration inventory design encompassing the approach (real-time vs. batch), protocols used, and interface formats for over 20 existing bank systems.
  4. CI/CD DevOps Pipeline: Engineered a robust Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) DevOps pipeline utilizing Gradle, Jenkins, Junit, and Flyway. This implementation significantly accelerated the development, testing, and deployment processes while maintaining consistency.
  5. High-Availability & DR Design and Security Measures: Advised on high-availability and disaster recovery design, security measures, monitoring mechanisms/metrics, SLA/performance targets, backup and restore strategies, and overall system operation design.
  6. Technical Acceptance Testing Execution: Conducted and executed all technical acceptance tests, including performance testing, resiliency/DR testing, backup/restore testing, and system operation testing.
  7. Overall Application Batch Job Design for 1,000+ Batch Jobs: Designed and provided guidance on the overall application batch job design, encompassing over 1,000 batch jobs. This included execution schedules, job dependencies, and the operational model within the enterprise scheduler, Control-M.
  8. Batch Job Testing and Validation: Led the testing efforts for all batch jobs, validating the sanity and correctness of these jobs under diverse scenarios, including normal working days, weekends, public holidays, month-ends, month beginnings, and unexpected events like extreme weather conditions or sudden day-offs.
  9. Production Cutover Support and Warranty Period Assistance: Provided comprehensive support during the production cutover phase and offered assistance throughout the warranty period to ensure the ongoing stability and efficiency of the newly implemented system.