PaceMaker
Introduction
PaceMaker is a real-time Transaction Process Monitor and Exception Resolution product for Capital Markets. It functions across all asset classes, and provides a compliance framework for all the key performance indicators within your business.
PaceMaker is used in a variety of applications to improve transparency, to audit price verification and manual workflow, to monitor trade processes and to improve customer relationships and service levels.
Sitting on top of an institution's legacy systems and architecture, PaceMaker will ‘listen’ in to the entire business event flow from end to end. These events are then processed and filtered against a set of pre-defined business rules. Any exceptions to these rules are flagged in real-time through an intuitive traffic-light dashboard display. The user of PaceMaker can be instantaneously alerted as problems and opportunities arise.
PaceMaker and Business Process Management
PaceMaker is independent from the underlying Business Process Management (BPM) layer. PaceMaker is BPM-agnostic and is typically installed on top of systems already in place within the institution. Leveraging and protecting existing investments in middleware, it can source events from a message bus where one is in place but equally well from files, databases and other legacy sources.
PaceMaker has the ability to correlate out-of-order events and to create a holistic transactional view across multiple data sources and business processes. This functionality is unique to PaceMaker and is a pre-requisite for company-wide compliance and optimization.
PaceMaker can enhance the BPM layer where implemented, but the business drivers for using PaceMaker focus on monitoring existing discrete systems. Institutions can uncover exceptions and improve operational efficiency and customer service, while reducing operational risk. BPM, if present, can be used to manage the exceptions raised by PaceMaker, to automate their resolution and thus improve Straight Through Processing (STP) rates. Either way, PaceMaker helps identify and fix problems earlier and faster!
Transcending Silo Systems
PaceMaker was conceived to solve the business problems experienced in the Financal Services industry: Silo systems each with its own unique key and data model of a transaction, with no single system having an holistic view of the business transaction as it progresses though the business.
However, there is nothing inherently financial about the PaceMaker architecture, it has no dependency on the data it is monitoring (or the underlying data model) and so can track any business activity across any set of transaction systems. PaceMaker is particularly suitable for transaction flows that extend outside an organization, where external events must be matched and correlated to internal views of the same transaction.
Unique Features
PaceMaker is different from pure-play Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) systems, real-time reconciliation systems and transaction monitors, in three major areas:
- Out-of-Order events
PaceMaker can track a business transaction even when the events are not correctly ordered – for instance, when an FX Confirm arrives before the Trade Ticket - Transitory Closure
PaceMaker can collapse two trades into one, on receipt of additional information -
Transitory Splitting
PaceMaker can split a single transaction into multiple trades, if new information indicates that this is appropriate
These functions are key to PaceMaker’s ability to track and display events relating to a single Business Transaction, as it flows across multiple, discrete systems. Other solutions simply trap an event that has occurred, but do not correlate that event at a business level to other events occurring at other points within the flow.
Technology
PaceMaker was completely re-engineered in 2002 to embrace and to take advantage of J2EE, facilitating integration within the target architecture of the major investment banks. The product set is fully compliant with the J2EE architecture and its best practices. PaceMaker uses JMS messaging throughout, with XML definitions. It can run on any J2EE application server, using any JMS implementation and any JDBC accessible database. Furthermore, all PaceMaker components are deployed as servlets so they can run on a low cost platform such as Tomcat on Linux.
XML is now the format of choice for inter-process and inter-organisation messages (e.g. Swift, GSTPA etc). By adopting XML as the basis of the design, PaceMaker inherits the properties and key advantages of XML – extensibility and flexibility. Hence, PaceMaker has no data model as such, but can be configured to read and operate on any XML format, no matter how complex. In addition to the advantages XML bestows upon PaceMaker, support for JMS enables PaceMaker to be open, scalable, and resilient.