GNI recognised the need to radically overhaul its existing systems 18 months ago. The success of its new internet based trading facility now called GNI touch™, the initial version of which won the FT best business website award in 1998, and the introduction of a new equities product, Contracts for Difference (CFD), caused the volume of transactions within GNI to increase significantly. GNI’s management soon realised that its existing reporting systems, which were a mixture of in-house and standard desktop applications holding increasingly complicated spreadsheets and databases, needed to be improved to handle the sheer volume and complexity of transactions. Furthermore, the scope of management information was limited; GNI needed to be able to report on its P&L on a daily basis, which the new system has allowed.
“The OST Business Rules software has given GNI the ability to bring these new products to market in a controlled and audited manner” said Jeremy Wood, Director, OST Business Rules Ltd. “GNI wanted to build a flexible systems architecture that supported its business objectives, and saw that OST could provide a key component of its front to back office integration.”
The system has been live since 1 October and processes over 100,000 trade events creating over 200,000 accounting entries per day. The old systems will effectively be “switched off” in a month’s time.
“The installation of the OST product represents our first true straight through processing solution” says Mark Wigfield, Project Manager, GNI. “Data can flow seamlessly from the front office trading systems through to the production of the consolidated daily P&L by the back office with no manual intervention whatsoever. Moving forward, as our trading volumes continue to expand and we continue to grow the web-based side of our business, OST Business Rules will remain an integral part of our Management Information Systems.”
The OST software runs on Sun Microsystems hardware and utilises an Oracle database.
