HSBC Global Banking and Markets provides investment banking and financing solutions for corporate and institutional clients, including corporate banking, investment banking, capital markets, trade services, payments and cash management, and leveraged acquisition finance.

HSBC used their WhatIf solution (formerly RAVEN Credit Risk) to calculate counterparty credit risk exposure. It was designed and developed to provide advanced intra-day counterparty credit risk analytics to users with supported for 15 financial products across 14 countries.

There were a need to replace the existing application with a modern, rapid and more engaging alternative, allowing to react to new legislations quickly, reduce time to market for new risk measures rollout and increase usage over more users and regions. The first generation of the application was developed over a number of years and used technologies that quickly became obsolete, resulting in a cumbersome, slow to respond and hard to maintain solution that provided a poor user experience. Within that context, HSBC was looking to re-build the solution from the ground up.

Along with my team, we combined an expertise in RIA solutions and financial platform development and were engaged to provide a dynamic front-end application that plugged into HSBC’s complex legacy systems. I personally engaged through the full project lifecycle and led the analysis, design, build and launch stages.

Following a successful pilot, we leveraged our robust foundations and iteratively delivered all financial products and analytical tools to the business. The application was designed to allow traders to easily, securely and rapidly view and manipulate huge volumes of data and risk analytics. The end result enables them to retrieve counterparties, view their portfolio, add, remove, share and manage deals from 15 financial products, and calculate the simulated counterparty credit risk exposure in seconds, rather than minutes. This enabled faster and better trading decisions to be made and a significant increase of usage by 40% only 6 months post launch.