Justification of Engagement with Altio: Paragon Reports Project
Paragon is a sister division of Altio which both sit under the COR-FS umbrella.
Paragon is a leading portfolio accounting, customer safekeeping and collateral management solution that affords superior flexibility and instrument coverage for both debt and funding sides of your organization.
As part of Paragon’s continuing investment process there has been a recent focus upon the suite of 180 plus accounting and management reports. The aim of the project is to provide an enhanced user experience, and support reports that can be scheduled to run offline and accessed through a web browser.
The project was initiated from ongoing consultancy provided by Altio who were the chosen vendor for providing a reporting user interface. The requirements identified were to provide a user interface using AltioLive, but in addition to this Altio as an organisation was selected to design and manage the implementation to migrate the reports from the existing architecture. The new architecture provides a more extensible framework with which to meet client demands.
The new architecture consists of an AltioLive user interface that supports configuration, scheduling and administration of Paragon’s reports. The business logic is implemented as web services using .NET, with a de-coupled data layer allowing future integration with any database vendor.
Further to the objective above, additional and enhanced functionality was requested by Paragon which in turn became part of the core Altio Report Writer product including:
Report Scheduling
The ability to provide enhanced report scheduling was a requirement of Paragon’s reporting module. This was a highly desired function by Paragon’s client base and became part of the scope of the core ARW product.
Report Designer
The Altio Report Designer is a Business Intelligence-like tool kit to manipulate existing reports, use existing reports as templates and create new reports in a drag and drop environment. Potential benefit to a wider audience, beyond Paragon, was identified and thus the Report Designer was included in the scope of the core Altio Report Writer product.
Follow-up Paragon/Altio Ventures
The monitors described below came about as a result of investigation by Paragon into the possibility of leveraging its experience with AltioLive. The use of AltioLive allows the extension of Paragon’s product set into the domain of real-time, data visualization modules, offered as add-on’s to the core Paragon product.
Position Monitor
The Position Monitor application is a web based solution that has a set of highly interactive and feature rich dashboards. The dashboards will allow customers and other stakeholders, such as other banking operational areas and downstream customers to view their current portfolio inventory by displaying;
- summary of portfolio positions and net collateral available With drilldown from an institution level down to individual positions
- detail of positions within individual portfolios including projections as well as a two day look-back
- transaction details including all activity impacting net positions
Data is pushed from the server to the Position Monitor client using AltioLive context based routing.
Customer Information Monitor
Paragon’s clients requested a solution, using AltioLive technology to display customer information in real-time. The Customer Information Monitor is used by user groups outside of the Treasury Department to retrieve information on customer balances, including Cash Management Groups, Government Banking Groups, etc. They use this information for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to balance inquiry, audit requests, etc.
The Paragon team is currently working internally to develop new concepts for generally available monitors in line with their aim of adding value to their existing product and furthermore, in meeting custom monitor demands by existing and potential clients.