Providing Specialized Services and Solutions for Leading Global and Regional Banks, Corporate and Financial Institutions: FinMechanics

Headquartered in Singapore, FinMechanics is a team of motivated professionals having a strong understanding of Financial  Markets and Risk Management.”

 FinMechanics is a financial market consulting company begun in 2007. The Company faced both new opportunities and unique challenges in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The crisis had a profound impact as clients were faced with big gaps in existing legacy solutions arising out of fundamental changes in derivatives valuation, multi-curve requirements, CVA/FVA, etc. FinMechanics also realized that resulting regulatory changes would need capital markets business to adopt new tools and technologies to keep pace with the changes around them. This led to FinMechanics building tools for markets and risk management adding a rapidly growing product dimension to the consulting business. Also working closely with banks for the last nine years in the financial technology space, FinMechanics is well positioned to assist banks in reorganizing the markets business with tools and business knowledge necessary for the task ahead.

FinMechanics; The whole package
The organization is split into two business lines – Consulting and Products.

The Consulting Practice of FinMechanics enables clients to derive business benefits in the form of enhanced profitability, reduced costs and time to market, regulatory compliance and decision making tools.

The consulting team works on derivatives pricing, collateral management, credit/funding adjustments and model validation. They also solve problems faced in transfer pricing, market risk, counterparty credit risk and P&L reconciliation across front office, risk and finance.

The team works with front office, operations and middle office to implement systems and processes to increase STP rates and automate settlements and trade clearing.

The Product Suite of FinMechanics has three platforms – FM Converge, FM Connect and FM Physicals.

FM Converge offers a highly responsive platform to price, structure, and manage risk. The platform also enables straight through processing of vanilla and exotic trades along with an integrated accounting module. The Risk module of FM Converge gears up organizations with tools to face current and upcoming regulatory changes like FRTB (both SA and IMA). Born out of the financial crisis, the platform incorporates funding, collateral and credit costs on a pre-trade basis.

FM Converge is in use at both mid-size banks along with large multi-locational trading desks. The platform allows replacement of its native pricing library with a bank’s own library or popular third party libraries such as Numerix, OpenGamma, etc.

FM Connect is a cross-asset Single Dealer Platform (SDP) effectively taking the bank’s sales team to their customers’ desktop and handheld devices. It enables the bank’s customers to view and transact on streaming tradable quotes and negotiate prices for vanilla and exotic financial instruments across various asset classes. The client layer workflows along with look and feel can be fully tailored to meet each bank’s unique requirement and provide the SDP as imagined by each bank.

FM Physicals is an integrated front to back platform for commodities. The platform improves efficiency in physical trading of precious metals, base metals and wholesale banknotes business and can be adapted to other commodities. The platform handles all kinds of trade variations and their hedges with pre-deal inventory and limit checking, spreading rules, deal lifecycle and accounting.

FM Bullion, which belongs to the suite of Physicals, caters for both Physical Bullion and Paper Trading (Proprietary desk and Hedging).

Areas of focus      
FinMechanics has clients in the Asia Pacific and in the Middle East and is looking to expand coverage to Europe and the US over the next 18 months. The consulting services and product offerings of FinMechanics are targeted towards the markets business and enterprise risk management departments of banks, hedge funds and financial institutions. This has been the domain expertise of the company and is going to remain the focus area in the foreseeable future.

FinMechanics experience ranges across all asset classes (FX Cash, Fixed Income, Interest Rate Derivatives, FX Options,Equities Cash and Derivatives, Credit, Inflation and Commodities) and the entire functionality set of the markets business (covering front office tools, pricing, risk views, processing, confirmations, payments, accounting, VaR & Expected Shortfall, Limit Control and Regulatory Compliance).

Don’t blend in when you can stand out

FinMechanics differentiates itself in being a solution provider that works extremely closely with clients from design to implementation. The problems it addresses are generic for the market, but they take a variety of shapes and sizes in different contexts and hence require customization of solutions for specific market segments. Working in embedded teams with clients the Company provides technology and functional inputs as the situation demands. The combination of rich domain expertise, adoption of latest technology tools and committed client support with a very strong sense of ownership is what makes them unique in the field.

Clients cheer them on
As a consulting organization, the metric of client satisfaction is repeat assignments, which FinMechanics prides itself on. As the product suite was being rolled out in multiple client locations, the response received was as the Company puts it “extremely encouraging.” When a large regional bank wanted to move from their legacy markets platform to a modern post-crisis framework, they chose FM Converge.

Additionally, they wanted to use their own pricing libraries for valuation of the financial products, which the open architecture of FM Converge readily allowed. The platform today is used by traders in multiple geographies across the globe for pricing, trading and managing cross asset risk.

Know the Key Executive
Anindya Sarkar, CEO – Anindya co-founded FinMechanics in 2007. Prior to FinMechanics, he had worked with ICICI Bank, India as a corporate banker and with Reuters and Murex in Singapore in various roles ranging from consulting, implementation, project , business development and enterprise platform sales. Anindya is an Electrical Engineer from IIT Kharagpur and he also holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta.

“Our highly motivated team with keen commitment towards solving clients’ problems has built strong and lasting relationships with them.”