Trading Application Tactic Implementation

Business Case:

A Fortune 500 global financial services client’s growth was quickly exceeding the capacity of their trading application.  The trading application is responsible for critical workflow for sales credits and trade approvals.  Built originally in 2006 with rapid application development in a short timeframe, the application could not scale to current trade thresholds.  As the trade application subscribes to a back end trading system, trades are received blindly without knowledge of volume.  The client was looking for tactical short term improvements to critical application hot spots to reduce memory, application crashes, functional enhancements, improve stability, and increase performance.    

Solution: 

CapTech consultants worked with a geographically distributed team to make significant improvements to the application. The application was extended to handle additional upstream systems and eliminated several applications completely. CapTech added workflow capabilities to the application to eliminate manual workflow processes and meet compliance requirements. Centralized error reports were reviewed to find and fix several issues causing the majority of application instability.  CapTech analyzed and drafted ten tactical improvements strategically targeted to reduce memory footprints, ensure industry best practices, and stability.  With client input, five tactics were implemented to address critical application components.     

Tools: 
  • .NET 3.5
  • Visual Studio
  • XML, XSLT
  • Infragistics NetAdvantage
  • dotTrace Memory and Performance Profiler
Results: 
  • Improved top-line scalability from 50,000 to 110,000 trades per day.
  • Improved per-trade processing performance by 140 percent.
  • Consolidated business logic and eliminated three external IT applications.
  • Reduced or eliminated several manual workflows.
  • Implemented compliance with new Federal regulations regarding post-trade date amendments.
  • Removed unnecessary XML consumption points and column renderings.  
  • Reviewed and implemented industry best practices to manage resources and custom control implementations.