“Working with Hexacta has been an incredibly productive experience. Not only did the Hexacta team rapidly get up to speed with our challenging requirements, but they also delivered an excellent product, in time, and within budget. As a result of a successful initial project, we are now outsourcing to Hexacta most of our software development tasks.”

Sebastian Ceria, President and CEO, Axioma, Inc.

Brief description of the company

Axioma is a leading company that provides innovative risk analysis, portfolio rebalancing, 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.

The challenge

In June 2002, Axioma released version 1.0 of its product Portfolio Precision (which was later called Axioma Portfolio).

Once the product was introduced to its clients shortly after, Axioma identified several needs for improvement, both in terms of functionality and ease of use.
An important aim 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, and the new versions  (2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.3) of Axioma Portfolio were released.

Given the excellent results obtained, Axioma chose Hexacta as its technological partner to pursue other projects that would enable Axioma to diversify the services and products offered to the market.

Solution

These are some of the projects developed for Axioma and the most important aspects of each of them:

Project: Axioma Portfolio

Axioma Portfolio is the main product offered by the company for the optimization of financial market companies’ investment portfolios. It allows the user to build portfolios, analyze the risks and optimize their investment strategy, using an optimization engine of Axioma’s proprietary technology.

Hexacta has recently developed the enhancements for the release of the application’s latest version, with a working team integrated by 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 administration reports were considerably improved.

Project: Axioma Portfolio Analytics

Axioma Portfolio Analytics analyzes portfolios, revealing risks and sources of returns for attribution in both ex-ante and ex-post analyses.
It applies time series risk analysis, stress testing and both traditional Brinson and factor-based performance attribution. Leveraging the strengths full integration with Axioma’s fundamental, statistical and macroeconomic risk models, or custom risk models built with Axioma Risk Model Machine.

Project: Axioma Risk

The Hexacta team had to quickly adapt to work along with the client to implement the required functionality. As the team achieved a greater understanding of the business, several proposals were carried out to add value to the work done.

A full visual redesign of the application was suggested and implemented, making it more clear and intuitive.
Another major improvement that Hexacta’s team was involved in was the increase of quality product, by proposing, specifying and laying the groundwork for the implementation of unit tests.

Project: Axioma Data Services

Hexacta developers worked together with Axioma developers as if they were one single and highly consolidated team.
There was a strong focus in clean separation between responsibilities layers, allowing different users to handle permissions on Axioma’s entities without losing sight of how it is improving the application’s performance.

The existent application was incrementally modified until it became a server-based, enterprise-like solution, which provides multi-user capabilities, process execution, and services like caching, security, licensing, upgrading, centralized and controlled scheduling.

Applied technologies

• Axioma Portfolio. Stand-alone 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.
• Axioma Portfolio Analytics. Stand-alone type application developed in Java, using Eclipse RCP framework for the implementation of the user interface. The persistence is being done in SQL Server and the reports were generated by SQL Reporting Services.
• Axioma Risk. Web application, implemented in C#, Silverlight 5.0 NET Framework 4.5, SQL Server 2008 R2. The most important frameworks and tools used in the development were Prism 4 Unity and Silverlight 5 Toolkit - December 2011.
• Axioma Data Services. Web solution implemented using REST. It allows users to share their Axioma entities with other users or groups.