OPSCO, a unit recently formed to develop a global operations capability at HSBC, has selected San Francisco-based vendor Calypso to provide the processing platform for the group's worldwide treasury markets and securities trading operations.
Most of the work for this is being done in Hong Kong and Shenzen, which remains the bank's back-office technology centre.
"Amongst our goals are the reduction of transaction costs and the enhancement of services to HSBC Group's customers," says Andy Mayer, director of OPSCO, a recently formed unit to develop a global operations capability at HSBC. "We looked for a real-time platform that would give us cross product straight-through-processing, and equally important, one built with a modern architecture. This is a strategic investment for us; we want a system to serve us for years to come."
Calypso will provide all back office processing including settlements and documentation, accounting and P&L. The first implementation will be for foreign exchange with money markets, equities, derivatives and fixed income to follow.
HSBC also sees benefits beyond the cost savings. "Increasingly, new customer services are technology based," says Mayer. "To succeed, you need an environment that allows you to innovate - flexibility and time to market are key here."
Coinciding with this key client signing is the announcement that Arnie Papp has joined as Calypso's general manager for Asia-Pacific. Papp will build a team to support Calypso's growth and sell its real-time trading and processing system in Asia-Pacific, starting in Sydney where the company has just established an office and hired local support staff.
Papp joins the company from GlobalSight Corporation, an enterprise software company, where he was Vice-President of Sales. Prior to that he worked the Asia-Pacific financial markets as regional GM for Infinity Financial Technology. In that role, he set up and managed Infinity's regional operations from Tokyo. He has also previously worked for Fuji Bank and Prudential Securities in Tokyo.
