Case study: Capital Market Services, CMS

Customer Profile

Not many companies can boast that a single software product actually quadrupled sales, but Capital Market Services is one business that can. Headquartered in New York, CMS is a successful foreign currency trading firm.  The 7-year-old institution participates in a liquid market where over $1.5 trillion criss-crosses the electronic transom in foreign exchange investments daily. With sophisticated and entry level traders as customers, CMS manages foreign currency exchange (FOREX) portfolios, educates new clients, and consults with traders to choose the best currency investments for their needs.

Its proprietary technology for trading and tracking the market is a key differentiator between CMS and its competitors.  Its flagship tool called the VT Trader frees customers to conveniently place orders via a mouse-click and to monitor their trades on-line. Users can access detailed graphs and charts, analyze their own portfolio performance, and watch the market’s progress.

The Problem   

Because CMS and its customers rely so heavily on-line transactions using VT Trader, CMS needed a solution that would eradicate the myriad of system problems frustrating growth. 

Softwarewise, CMS supported the J2EE Architecture, Microsoft Windows and Delphi clients, together with the Oracle database.  External banking institutions were connected into the system using proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs). 

The current scenario stymied any efforts towards CMS’ goals of expansion.  First, due to a limited set of features inherent in the J2EE software, the system was woefully slow.  Users could not obtain data in real time, resulting in lost opportunities to make quick trading decisions.  The delays meant that the firm could have lost millions of dollars in missed transactions.  Customers would be tempted to turn to other firms providing faster data response times. CMS knew it would not be able to meet system performance demands as new customers came on board.

Secondly, the software had reached its maximum capacity load and could not accept any more new users. It simply lacked scalability.  Without adhering to industry protocols and poor integration among its financial applications, the system was a complete management nightmare for IT staff. In addition, creating custom add-on features was extremely complex and time intensive.

Third, the system’s limited security left clients vulnerable in the wake of a hacker breech.

When customers transmitted their orders, outsiders had an open window  to alter or even delete the information. The security holes had to be addressed.

Worse yet, when communicating with the software from outside banks, it was common for clusters of messages to be lost under heavy transaction loads. Integration between CMS software and that of external banks was difficult and unreliable under the current conditions.

stood at a major crossroad as its company’s livelihood was at stake. For awhile, it seemed that the only options available would be outrageously costly. It could either delay an upgrade and hire more IT admin staff for 24 x 7 on-site monitoring to repair crashes or pay a service provider to rebuild the system from scratch, shutting down the current one until full redeployment.

The Solution

Given this nerve-racking experience, CMS officials had clear product requirements in mind.  It needed a tool that offered real-time messaging, ease of integration, minimum impact on its existing systems, faster time to market.  Executives hired the team from Creative Science Systems (CSS) to analyze these problems and prepare a plan of attack.  CSS launched a pilot to test its proposed methodology and product line.

After initial success, CSS invested another two weeks integrating the CSS NetZyme® technology on top of CMS’ existing applications without forcing the financial trading company to discard any of its technology assets.

In less than a month and a working budget under $100K, CSS completely merged its NetZyme server, featuring its Universal Messaging Bus (UMB), into the outdated CMS architecture, breathing new life into the entire VT Trader Platform. As part of the plan, CSS integrated the JMS with the UMB adapter with little coding.

Due to the addition of the NetZyme server, the CSS staff was able to provide minimal coding to access UMB from the Delphi client. Last, CSS deployed its SSL adapter into the CMS mix, with no coding whatsoever.

Migrating the CSS solution to the CMS platform took a short amount of time with little to no interruption of business activities. CMS executives stress that the cutover was completely unobtrusive to users. 


Benefits

Soon after deployment, results were immediate. The most striking benefit was the four hundred percent increase in customers. The quadrupling of clients was equivalent to millions of dollars more in annual revenue.

Overall performance has been enhanced, and the system can handle peak trading hours with ease.  The CMS trading platform, VT Trader, is able to deliver real-time quotes and charts to clientele. As customers were noticeably impressed, so was Visual Trading Systems, the platform’s original developer.

And since no bottleneck was occurring, and the system experienced little to no crashes, IT maintenance costs have plummetted. According to Vera Hawkin, CMS chief executive officer, "Creative Science Systems’ solutions enabled us to significantly increase efficiencies in key areas of our trading platform. This enabled us to compete at a higher level as well as provide superior services that have become synonymous with our company name, not to mention peace of mind of having a world class trading platform that harnesses the power of real-time data delivery to an array users."

Future Plans

CMS executives agree that its future service expansion will require additional CSS technology that supports SOA and open standards. 

From that perspective, CSS products will be high on the to-buy list at CMS. Says Hawkins, “We are constantly in the process of developing new services for our clients, and NetZyme’s SOA solution is helping us in new design areas.”

Summary

For companies such as CMS, the CSS choice has proven to be clean, simple, and effective.  This is the first time the FOREX trading firm ever used SOA products. Working with the knowledge CSS staff was excellent and product installation quick and no-nonsense, agree CMS IT managers.

 “The benefits of our new  trading platform are pretty straightforward,” reports Hawkin. “From an IT perspective, we can build and integrate services faster and cheaper. From a business perspective, we wanted to increase the quality of our trading platform by eliminating the need to constantly custom code. We are improving information flow, reducing operating costs, and enabling faster, better decisions for brokers and customers.  All of these resulted in making us a more attractive trader to the market, which has been one of the keys to the growth of our company.”