Why I love working with Murex

There is one great thing about working on Murex: there is rarely 1 answer to a problem. But usually you can sometimes find a better solution:

Someone asked me to input a large number of SCFs (>300) with all the information in Excel. My first thought was: EVS task and I send either a large XML or multiple.

Luckily for me, it was a bit late so I thought I would do it the next day (this post is not about pushing back all your work to tomorrow, seriously!). Before going to work I then thought that Murex has some looping functionality in the code and I could build a lookup table with all the counterparts and currencies to input (amount was irrelevant).

Then  a macro would read the lookup table and insert a new SCF leg for each record changing the currency and counterpart.

Was quite happy with myself (better solution yeah!). And then opening eTradepad, something clicked in my head: while having SCFs as a line in ePad, I could as well have all the SCFs I needed in a single notepad and paste the list of counterparts and currencies.

Then a quick select all and capture trade : boom! All trades are booked and effort required was <5 minutes.

Basically I went through 3 levels before finding the best solution (if you can think of a better solution, you deserve praise!). Of course, if it happens before you start implementing a lesser solution, it’s perfect but sometimes it unfortunately comes AFTER you built the solution. Then it is quite frustrating.

And that’s the beauty of working with Murex, as there is rarely 1 single solution, you need sometimes to think differently in order to perceive the other solutions.

What about you? Ever experienced this feeling of breakthrough and finding other solutions? Feel free to share below!