De-risking Excel use in front-office trading

Microsoft Excel has been a staple of productivity on Wall Street for years because it puts the power to calculate market data models directly in the hands of quants and traders. But Excel use has been difficult for the bank’s IT staff to manage and auditors to oversee since the traders’ formulas live on their PC and are in constant flux. Wouldn’t it be great if trading firms could let their traders have the tool they want (Excel) and still be able to track and audit formulas and changes centrally?

That’s just what we recently announced with our partner, BCC Group of Germany. BCC Group introduced a solution called CALCNODE that can run thousands of very complex Excel spreadsheets with better performance and accountability than ever before.

CALCNODE offloads complex calculations to a high-performance computing environment, and uses our appliance to supply the spreadsheets with real-time market data and keep real-time data flowing between spreadsheets and the powerful calculation engine which lives in a shared back end.

This lets companies boost the productivity of their employees by making their existing Excel spreadsheets run faster, while simultaneously giving them unprecedented oversight and accountability so they can better comply with increasingly stringent government regulations.

It’s an ingenious use of high-speed messaging and high performance computing to solve a long term challenge – reducing the risk of using of Excel in trading.