Category Archives: Info

Bank organization

This post is not really for you veterans out there but more for more junior readers for which there is a bit of mystery about how a bank works.

If we focus solely on the financial markets part of the bank, you have 4 big categories:

Front office: This team encompasses the traders, the quants (depending on how a bank is organized, you sometimes have FO quants effectively sitting with the traders and pure quants), sales, treasury and FO management.
Processing: This massive team (sometimes referred to as Back office) processes confirmations, accounting, payments, securities and cash nostros, …
Risk: They ensure that the risk held by Front Office is actually within limits and their job is to ensure that the bank is not too exposed. You will find here risk controllers.
IT: The role of IT is to ensure that all works as expected. They are also in charge of upgrades/migrations (with the help of the teams above).

Of course, you have some roles which actually sit in between 2 or 3 categories and within each categories you have roles which are very different. But the idea here is to draw attention that there are different needs and drivers between teams.

Murex consultants normally act as second level of support and are most often contacted by people from the IT category. It often happens that they find themselves on the front line especially on more complex or urgent issues.

At some later stage, I’ll try to detail a bit more within the different groups but if you’re impatient or got some questions, feel free to ask!

Scoring a job with Murex

In the continuation of the previous post, here are details as to how the interview process works and what is expected of you.

The level required by candidates is actually very high, this ensures people who can learn quickly but also it builds a company spirit where you are surrounded by very good people. This is very motivating.

For graduates (or non senior positions), one of the first things that happens during the recruitment is a knowledge test. Depending on the type of job you’re applying for, the test might vary. Without detailing what the tests can be about, the idea is to test what you should know (maths, financial questions if you studied finance, programming if applicable, etc…) but also how do you think and if you have the good reflexes when faced with a problem.

So for more junior people, revise what you have studied and also try to understand what Murex is about (this website and Murex website will be good sources of information).

If you manage to get a job, you will receive trainings from Murex about basics (what’s a rate curve, what are the different type of options, what are accounting entries, etc…) the idea is to ensure that even if you are not working in a particular domain, you have a basic knowledge as to what it is. The trainings then move to specificities of Murex and how the software works, the internal processes, etc…

While the training takes 6 weeks to 2 months, Murex tends to consider that the investment in someone starts to pay off after 18 months, once you build confidence and knowledge. There will be lots of things for you to do prior to that but you’ll be well assisted to insure you learn as quickly as possible.

As 18 months is a significant amount of time, it is important for Murex to recruit the right people, hence the focus put on the recruitment process.

For more senior positions, this is of course on an ad hoc basis given how well your skills are transferable.

More questions, feel free to comment or go to the forums and I’ll try to answer them

Murex teams

Murex people are split into many different teams and sometimes it is not obvious which team does what. Let me detail the different teams here:

– Dev teams. This is the team customers will never talk with. Their jobs is of course to develop new features but also correct bugs and other issues. Most of the development is done from Paris.

– PES Teams (Product Evolution Services). These teams are the main interfaces between business and developers, they’re split by asset class or activity (processing for instance). Their job is to build the development roadmap with developers, write specs, test new functionalities, present roadmaps, assist other teams with asset specific questions. They’re often on the front line for presenting the software as they have a strong understanding of the business needs and the software. Location wise, they’re mostly based in Paris along with developers.

– CES Teams (Customer Evolution Services). These teams are in charge of following customers. They’re usually the first point of contact for customers and will follow internally on what a customer needs. Outside Paris, most consultants are classified as CES as they’re all customer facing.

– PAC team (Performance and Architecture). They have multiple missions: work with the dev team to agree on the architecture to be adopted by the software: services, modules, technology used,… but also monitoring and improving the performance of the software. For example, ensuring that the software could cope with a large volume of transactions without slowing down (FX cash business) is their work. They’re also tasked with assisting customers in choosing the right hardware and producing performance tests.

– Operate. This team works 24×6 (if not 24×7) and is a second line of support for Murex teams. They have a large knowledge of the application and assist the other teams in many ways (building a new environment, tracking a crash, etc…)

– QA. The team is mostly based in Beirut and crunches through all the reports generated everyday tracking any regressions or undocumented change.

– Release management. Their job is to ensure that the software patches and versions are released on time.

– Bizdev. This one encompasses:  pure bizdev people on the lookout for new opportunities, following on prospects and account managers who are tasked with building a strong relationship with the customers.

– MTEK team. Murex documentation team, ensuring that all documents are of high standards, properly formatted and of course available to all customers.

– CDS (Client Delivery Services). This team follows projects and provide everything project wise from mandays to achieve tasks to project management and solution architect.

I have likely omitted some other teams (and I apologize to them in advance) but these are the main ones and which are mostly specific to Murex. I suspect that everyone knows that Murex has a Marketing, Accounting and legal departments!

 

Upgrading from 2.11 to 3.1

I often see posts about migration from 2.11 to 3.1, how difficult it is, what are the real benefits. So I’d thought a quick post here to demystify it might be worth it.

First of all, Murex is the best source of truth (as usual) for the migration and the more time passes, the easier the migration itself is as more and more cases are documented.

2.11 is the previous version of the Murex software. It has reached its end of life and new features are not developed onto it anymore.  All customers are strongly encouraged to move to 3.1.

3.1 is the newest version developed by Murex. Its main advantages over 2.11:

– Better workflows and better consistency of these workflows across the board. There are 3 workflows during a transaction life: pretrade workflow (which gets triggered while pricing), booking sequence (triggered when the trade is being booked) and post trade workflow (triggered after the deal is booked)

– Different consolidation process and Livebook as a new functionality

– Stronger rate curves framework/functionalities

– More models for pricing or volatility interpolation

– Better user management

– Improved pricing structure build

– Loads of smaller changes and bug fixes

For a migration to keep as identical, the main efforts of the migration will reside around workflows and working with Murex and their predefined templates. This is a great opportunity to revise the workflows but also a significant amount of work.

The trades then needs to be reconciled as 2.11 can sometimes return an incorrect valuation for specific trades  (I’m looking at you Buy/Sellbacks).

End of day will need to be revised, reports (extracts) can work from 2.11 but you might want to move them to datamart at some stage.

All in all, it is a migration but which is very streamlined and for which most issues have already been handled by Murex previously. If you have a pure front office implementation of Murex, the migration will be much quicker than if you have processing workflows involved.

More questions? Forum or comments below!

What and Who is Murex?

Maybe one of the first posts here should be to describe what Murex is (and isn’t). While you can refer to Murex official website, I’ll describe it with my own words.

Murex is a French company with offices all across the world. It was founded in 1986 but has changed drastically since that time. Nowadays it employs 1,500 people (roughly) worldwide with the main headquarters in Paris (where most of the development teams sit), New York, Singapore, etc…

Murex produces 2 softwares: Mx (current version is Mx 3.1, often referred to simply 3.1) and MLC. Mx is a front to back to risk trading software. In simpler terms, a user can prepare and price a transaction then book the transaction, monitor the PL and risk of his/her portfolios. The booked transactions can then generate confirmation and payment messages and accounting entries during the end of day. Risk reports (such as VaR) can then be generated.

MLC is a software for controlling limits. It can be used with Mx or any other trading platform.

Mx covers most if not all asset classes: Commodities, Interest rates (vanilla and derivatives), Foreign Exchange (vanilla and derivatives), Equities and Securities (and derivatives). It is also used for Asset management by various funds.

Murex is often considered leader (as best software) for the different asset classes as per the different survey organized by Risk magazine for instance. The main interest for customers is to be able to choose Murex for a single module or for a full enterprise system. The later is often what larger customers have in mind (and often opt for a tiered approach) as there are large benefits to reap from having a single system rather than multiple: less interfaces, consolidation of all positions, single evaluation engine, etc…

If you have more questions, please feel free to ask in the forum!

Welcome!

This site primary goal is to provide a place where information about Murex can be found. I’ve been in the industry for some time and often met people frustrated with the lack of information. It could be customers trying to understand what Murex can and cannot do or consultants trying to discover what Murex is about.

While I’ll try to help as much as possible, I cannot provide screenshots or documentation as they’re all Murex licensed and would be in complete breach of their copyright.

Hopefully this site will fill the gap where people can freely ask questions and browse through existing answers. Be it from the customers or from Murex employees themselves, there are some times where one feel uncomfortable about asking questions. So this site might be perfect to leverage off the internet (relative) anonymity and make it easy for you to fire off all questions you have through the forum.