Thunderhead NOW - the de facto standard for Trade Confirmations

Thunderhead is the recognized market leader in providing Trade Confirmation and Term Sheet generation solutions for OTC derivatives: in fact, our NOW platform has become the de facto standard, being used by 9 of the top 10 global derivatives dealer institutions. Leading sell-side organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Société Générale and UBS, have selected Thunderhead's powerful, business user-centric solution to automate their trade confirmation processes, streamlining their trade operations, and reducing both costs and risk.

Trades in OTC derivatives are skyrocketing and, according to the trade organization International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), Credit Derivative Swaps alone are now more than a $34.5 trillion market and are the fastest growing segment in the $454.5 trillion OTC derivatives marketplace, growing more than 100% in volume last year. As the volume of derivatives trades increases, so also do error rates and confirmation backlogs. For the year 2007 it is estimated that as many as 20% of trade confirmations had significant errors and required re-booking, resulting in additional costs, increased liability and risk, and longer backlogs.

Accelerating the Trade Confirmation Process

Streamlining the trade confirmation process requires automating the generation of confirmations for both standardized,vanilla trades and more complex, exotic trades.

The Thunderhead NOW Enterprise Communications platform allows operations personnel to create standardized legal content and complex business rules to enable the automated assembly and delivery of Trade Confirmation documentation. For standard vanilla trades, generation of confirmations can be completely automated, reducing the time required to create and approve confirmations from days, or even weeks, down to mere hours.

For the more complex exotic trades that cannot be fully automated, Thunderhead's Review Framework produces a review case of standard, approved clauses to create a draft confirmation for manual routing, review and editing by operations personnel. Modificatons, additions and deletions can be made quickly via a standard browser interface to create highly customized confirmations to support virtually any type of trade.

Supporting Automated Matching with DTCC Deriv/SERV

Thunderhead understands the complexity of automating the creation and delivery of trade confirmations. In addition to producing final confirmations in traditional delivery formats (e.g. print, fax, or email), Thunderhead also generates valid XML messages for electronic matching via DTCC Deriv/SERV services.

To better support our Investment Banking clients, Thunderhead has partnered with The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) to deliver "out-of-the-box" support for electronic matching and confirmation of OTC derivative trades via DTCC Deriv/SERV and the new Deriv/SERV Trade Information Warehouse. The Thunderhead XML Adapter for DTCC Deriv/SERV is an optional module that dynamically generates and validates properly formatted FpML XML messages for DTCC Deriv/SERV.

Thunderhead also provides a subscription service that ensures continuing support for DTCC's latest messaging standards for credit derivatives, equity derivatives, and interest rate swaps and swaptions. This subscription service is intended as a cost-effective solution for maintaining compliance with future DTCC standards releases, including ongoing support for the Deriv/SERV Trade Information Warehouse.

Read more about Thunderhead for OTC Trade Confirmations Download Thunderhead's Investment Banking Starter Pack Read the IBM White Paper "Thunderhead for Investment Banking Derivative Trade Confirmations" Register for IBM/Thunderhead White Paper "Automating the Confirmation of Dervivative Trades"