XP on Wall St. Credit Technology Steve Hayes

Introduction  The business problem  The technology requirements  What we built  How we built it  Results  Subsequent developments

Financial Risk  Every trade or position has risk/exposure  Mostly we hear about exposure to the markets  foreign exchange rates  interest rates  stock prices  There is also default risk

Credit Risk There are different flavours of default risk settlement, contingent, loan, market (sic) Complex relationships between parties subsidaries, joint ventures, guarantors And management tools securities, guarantee, netting agreeements

Credit Department Monitor exposure to individuals, companies, corporate structures, industries, sovereigns Set credit limits by company, by parent company, by product, by maturity

Technology Requirements Regular updates on all credit exposures from every department, in every subsidiary, in every geographic location approx. 500,000 open positions Limit setting tools lots of research, information aggregation, workflow management

Crisis Management What’s the impact of a company defaulting? We need to know right now We may want to stop outgoing payments What about an industry in trouble e.g. Californian electricity Or a sovereign? Rumours (e.g. Y2K)

Technology environment Feeding systems treated as legacy Perl, shell scripts, C++ Outsourced to Infosys, India Staff retention forced us to Java Global deployment issues Web based solutions more manageable

What did we build? Lots of information retrieval/aggregation web based Java servlets framework for automating single SQL queries (with parameters) 3 tier workflow management Java application on the client RMI server

What with? JDK 1.1/1.2 Visual Café, Visual SourceSafe In-house servlet engine Emergent frameworks virtual tables, servlet framework, database abstraction layer Build scripts DOS, Cygwin, JUnit

How? We used Extreme Programming a small team (6 people) in a large IT department (4,000 staff) lots of freedom to choose development approach no “official” endorsement of XP

Local Adaptations Three development “streams” One per customer Primary customer in London Pairs stable for a week Lots of domain friction moving from one stream to another Programmers reluctant to switch frequently Customer proxies on smaller streams

Were we successful? Productivity high Customer satisfaction very high We all kept our jobs XP was mandatory even after my departure

Later developments Ant, Jikes big benefits in speed, flexibility JSP, Weblogic Not clear that there was any productivity benefit Customer saw things slow down