risk is inherent in investing, and minimizing thatrisk is a common goal for money managers. mFSInvestment management®, a global asset manage-ment firm based in Boston, massachusetts, man-ages more than $410 billion in assets for clientsworldwide. When operating at the level of mFS,any trading error can have major, costly consequences. mFS created its Global Portfolio modeler (GPm)application to help mitigate investment, opera-tional, and technological risk. Investment andoperations teams use GPm to rapidly generatemodels based on proprietary algorithms, assessrisk, run compliance, and generate programtrades for globally managed portfolios. But theoriginal version of the application, built on a rela-tional database, was not fast or scalable enough tokeep pace with the organization’s growth, theincreasing speed of trading, and the mountingcomplexity of portfolios and regulations. So mFSdecided to create a new version.manuel Delgado, Assistant Vice President ofInvestment Systems Software Development at

mFS, observes that, “one of the principal objectives when deciding to revise GPm was to integrate a database that would allow for consistent levels of high performance coupledwith a large degree of scalability.” mFS choseInterSystems caché®. In-memory database speed, with persistenceA meeting with InterSystems, and the promise ofin-memory database speed with the reliability ofautomatic data persistence, led to a proof-of-con-cept project using caché and microsoft’s .netprogramming framework. the project focused onthe compliance engine inside GPm. “the compli-ance engine is central to the investment process,and was running within our relational database,”explains Delgado. running any given model canresult in thousands of complex rules beingchecked simultaneously and, even with tuning,performance on the relational database was lack-luster and problematic. the proof-of-concept withcaché exceeded expectations for performance.

Switch to caché from a relational database improves performance, reduces risk for mFS Investment management

n Reduced investment, operational, and technological risk

n Superior time-to-market for managing portfolio cash flows

n High-speed, highly reliable and scalable platform for growth

MFS Investment Management®

InterSyStemS SucceSS StoryInterSystems caché

Caché delivers the new generation of data managementSwitching from a “traditional” database to cachéhas given one of mFS’s key applications the speed,reliability, and scalability needed to carry theorganization forward for many years. caché hasproven to be a better solution for:n minimizing investment, operational, and technological risk n Providing superior time-to-market response for managing portfolio cash flowsn Guaranteeing that a modeling exercise will notalter the risk profile of a portfolion Providing a flexible and scalable platform toenable business growth “GPm is a vital application for mFS. Looking at theorder volume generated by the application sinceits inception, GPm has proven to be a remarkablesuccess,” says Delgado. “GPm and caché havehelped us clearly mitigate the risk of tradingerrors on the investment and operational sides ofthe business.”

The benefits of a high performancedatabase in financial applicationsthe switch to caché has enabled mFS to reach itsgoals for performance, reliability, applicationavailability, scalability, and risk reduction. GPmhas been remarkably stable with minimal supportand more efficient use of development resources.“I really enjoy the fact that now I never hear aword from users about performance problems inGPm,” says Delgado. Increased performance, lower risk the speed of GPm and its core risk algorithmswith caché gives portfolio specialists immediatefeedback on risk and other significant metricsduring the investment decision-making process.“We have seen a significant improvement in ourtime-to-market, from model instruction throughcompliance clearance to execution, since thechange to caché,” says Delgado. “more importantly,we have seen a significant reduction of invest-ment and operational risk.” Increased flexibility and reliabilitycaché combines a highly efficient multi-dimen-sional data store that simultaneously supportsobject and relational data access. Developersusing caché benefit from having a range of devel-opment technologies to choose from, includingcaché objectScript, c++, .net, and Java, with flexible data navigation. “the whole team enjoyedbeing able to work with objects in .net and justpersist those objects as is in caché without mapping,” notes Delgado.Reduced technological and operational riskDowntime in financial services may mean a significant loss of revenue. So mFS uses the highavailability features of caché to ensure that ifthere is a problem, work can continue uninter-rupted. “relational databases have their deficien-cies in supporting data-rich, highly computational,transactional applications, which can lead to out-ages or significant delays,” explains Delgado. “thedata model offered by caché is well suited for thistype of environment. using caché we have had aperfect record of availability with GPm.”

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“We have seen a significant improvement inour time-to-market, from model instructionthrough compliance clearance to execution,since the change to Caché.”Manuel Delgado, Assistant Vice President ofInvestment Systems Software Development, MFS Investment Management