Nomura manages upsurge in demand

Japanese bank Nomura has successfully rolled out an improved trading system in its London offices to manage its growing derivatives business.

Nomura Bank is using Thunderhead - a document generating system - to automatically produce trade confirmations and send documents to trading partners.

The system has allowed the bank to increase its derivatives confirmation productivity by 50 per cent since it first came online around 12 months ago.

Thunderhead has also helped the bank comply with Sarbanes Oxley regulations, by producing an improved audit trail, while also being flexible enough to fulfil future requirements such as MiFID.

Speaking at financial services show Finexpo last week, Martin Jacobs, head of global projects at Nomura said the bank's aim when choosing the system was to "grow business and expand horizons without curtailing our volume".

Cheat Sheets

♦ Basel II
♦ MiFID
♦ Sarbanes-Oxley

Jacobs added the bank wanted the system to make trade confirmations more efficient in terms of speed (via straight through processing) and limit the need to take on new staff to support the increase in trading.

He said: "The legacy systems gave us real constraints."

The new system has been such a success it is now being used by Nomura offices outside the UK.

Jacobs said: "It turned our London programme into a global programme."

Future plans include a version of Thunderhead that uses Japanese Kanji script, which would lay the foundations for the system's introduction in Nomura's Tokyo office in early 2008.