Axioma Portfolio
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Axioma Inc.
Brief description of the company
Axioma is a leading company that provides innovative risk analysis, portfolio rebalancing and performance attribution solutions and software for the financial services industry in the american market.
The company is headquartered in New York, with offices in Atlanta and Singapore. Its main clients are the major financial firms of the world.
One of its most important products is Axioma Portfolio, an application developed for the optimization of investment portfolios.
Problem
In June 2002 Axioma released version 1.0 of its product Portfolio Precision (which was later called Axioma Portfolio).
Shortly thereafter, once the product was introduced to clients, Axioma identified several needs for improvement, both in terms of functionality and ease of use.
One of Axioma’s concerns was to be able to divide the project in short phases, in order to quickly release improved versions of the product to the market.
Another important objective was to reduce the development costs of these improvements, taking advantage of remote development.
Hexacta was chosen as a supplier due to its competitive costs and excellent references. As a result, the necessary changes were analyzed, prioritized and developed, releasing the new versions (2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.3) of Axioma Portfolio.
Given the excellent results obtained, Axioma chose Hexacta as its technological partner to pursue other projects that would enable it to diversify the services and products offered to the market.
Solution
These are the different projects developed for Axioma and the most important aspects of each:
Project: Axioma Portfolio
As we mentioned before, Axioma Portfolio is the main product offered by the company for the optimization of investment portfolios of financial market companies.
It allows the user to build portfolios and perform risk and optimization analysis of the investment strategy, using an optimization engine of proprietary technology.
Hexacta has recently developed the enhancements for the release of the application’s latest version, with a working team integrated by 5 (five) people.
The improvement of the user interface was a significant aspect of the project, which facilitated the use and access of core functionalities for portfolio management. Furthermore, the reports administration was considerably improved.
Project: Custom Hedging Analysis Tool for Goldman Sachs
Application jointly developed with Axioma for Goldman Sachs, one of the most important banks in the world.
The Custom Hedging Analysis Tool functionality allows the user to maintain a constant gain rate through time, minimizing the investment risks.
With a working team integrated by 6 (six) people, Hexacta is Axioma’s main technology partner. It provides 70% of the workforce needed to achieve the objectives.
As a result of the first phase of the project, that lasted approximately 6 months, the first version of the product was launched and the client is currently using it with excellent results. The team is now working on a second phase which incorporates enhancements to the developed application.
Project: Performance Attribution
The main function of this application is to analyze a portfolio’s behavior over time in terms of return and risk exposure, in order to define an investment strategy that is predictable, repeatable and consistent in the future.
Hexacta actively participates with 5 (five) people in the development of this application.
Project: Enterprise Arquitecture
The solutions offered by Axioma at present are aimed at individuals, and are therefore desktop type applications. Axioma is currently undergoing an expansion period in which it will continue offering services for individuals but, at the same time, will focus in providing solutions to large companies. This requires a different approach, a paradigm based on Enterprise type architecture, service-oriented, with the ability to meet multiple requirements at a time, be physically distributed and escalate to demand.
Hexacta is currently at the definition stage of this architecture and performing concept tests. Once this stage is over, a reengineering of the products will take place in order to use the new architecture.
Applied Technologies
The current version of Axioma Portfolio is a standalone type application developed in Java, using Swing for the implementation of the user interface and XML for the objects persistence. In addition, JNI was used to integrate the optimization engine (developed in C + +) with the Java application.
The Enterprise Architecture definition is based on JEE Java technology, using frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Mule and Quartz, among others.
