As simple as possible;
but no simpler

Making premium lemonade (exhibit A) – JP Morgan adopts single trading platform

In today’s FT, JP Morgan announces its derivatives trading re-engineering effort – 3 years in the making, and baking.

Is this what everyone else means when they say preparing for regulatory compliance?

Probably not.

But this is what competitive differentiation looks like for JPM, so far (apparently):

– 4 technology program pillars (and 24 workstreams) of a strategic re-engineering effort (sponsor: J. Dimon).

  • Core trading platforms rationalization – rationalize application footprint, share pipes and plumbing between what’s left, plug into the same critical platforms;
  • Derivatives clearing, operations and STP workflow upgrades
  • Back Office systems upgrades
  • Critical Platforms re-engineering – where a lot of the neater stuff’s been percolating. Athena (which sounds like the single platform the FT is referring to – the shared risk, valuation and trade management platform with its common object store, DAG, node ranked calculations, and event-driven recalc), at least one (Python based) derivatives DSL, a global model library (with FPGA optimizations on several models).

– Market making rationalization – one primary market maker for each asset class regardless of eventual risk owner.