Pricing

Providing and maintaining a software solution for the calculation and settlement of custody account fees, transactions, and various other services.

Challenge

In order to be able to design prices individually and flexibly for institutional customers and to optimize its own earnings potential, our customer (a major Swiss bank) was looking for a new pricing system that allowed new fee models to be flexibly implemented, fully automated, and easily billed. With the existing solution, many services had to be billed separately, the choice of price models was severely limited and some processes and evaluations had to be created through time-consuming manual work.

The new solution needed to put all fees on one bill, allow much more flexible, new fee models, and largely automate the billing process. On the one hand, this required a high level of integration into the customer’s existing IT landscape, and on the other hand, the system had to be able to deal with considerable volumes of data, as detailed inventory and transaction data was necessary for calculating the fees. At any time, the solution needed to provide the user with an up-to-date overview of the processing status of billing. However, the key challenge was to provide the user with a convenient way to customize and maintain the pricing models.

Solution

Within a very short time, we created a prototype for the customer which demonstrated the central capabilities of the new software solution and thus laid the foundation for further action. Subsequently, an interdisciplinary team of business analysts, software architects and the customer’s pricing experts developed a concept and a corresponding architecture for the new pricing strategy.

The realization and integration of the new software took place in two phases within one year. A Java-based solution was created with an Oracle database as a persistence layer and a web-based user interface. In order to ensure a high degree of automation, more than fourteen complex interfaces with the necessary customer, business, and booking data had to be connected to the new pricing system. It uses both synchronous service calls as well as asynchronous messaging services and complex batch processing.

The pricing rules remain flexible and can be dynamically adapted to new customer requirements. In addition, the extraction of price-relevant information from the delivered business information is transparent and configurable. To do this, we use a secure and proven rule engine that allows the user to easily monitor and control the flow of information. The flexibility of pricing models places high demands on the web interface and requires a sophisticated and stable yet easy-to-understand user interface.

Our new pricing system generates the billing (with taxes) and delivers the raw data to an external output management system. An additional export function provides the user with the detailed billing data in the desired format at any time.

Since the customer wanted an automated booking of fees in the core banking system, we also realized the necessary COBOL software component on time and at a reasonable price.