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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!

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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!

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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.