Business Consultant
Bank of Montreal
Total years of experience :13 years, 0 Months
BMO GAM is consolidating its global Middle and Back Office operations at State Street, and the initiative to transition from the Current state to the Target Operating Model is known as Project One. The following services are being tested as a part of the Interim and Target states, from a BMO GAM in-house model to a fully outsourced model run by SSC :
• Back Office : ETF Basket Trading and Settlement Workflow (Transactions, Positions and Cash Recon in Simcorp)
ETF In-Kind Subscription/Redemption, Cash Subscriptions/Redemptions, Unit Issuance and Rebalancing
Migration of BMO ETFs and Mutual funds from BMO to StateStreet system and validation of ETF/MF NAVs generated
by StateStreet against BMO Prod generated NAV.
Transition of custodian data from CIBC MellonSimcorp to CIBC Mellon StateStreet, as Simcorp was being
decommissioned
• Middle Office : Implement E2E Trade Management workflow from CRIMS MarkitEDM StateStreet MarkitEDM CRIMS, for
all asset classes - Equity(Stocks, ADR/GDR, Rights, REITs), Fixed Income(Corporate/Callable/Puttable/Provincial
bonds, MBS/ABS), Money Market (Discount Note, Discount Commercial Paper), Options, Credit Default Swaps
Index(CDX) for Transactions, Positions, Securities and Portfolios
New Security Setup workflow in Charles River IMS
Implement Electronic Trade Notifications (ETNs) and reporting workflow for CAD (ETF, MF, Money Mkt, FI, Options)
As a UAT Lead, I had the following responsibilities:
• Analyzed and documented process decomposition and prepared business process workflows for the trade and settlement workflows for ETFs, Options, CDX.
• Elicited and tested the requirements for connectivity, file definitions, file layouts, delivery schedule as part of CUAT.
• Managed the Testing Dashboard and worked closely with BMO Dev, QA and Support teams for creating project test strategy, test case prep from user stories in Jira
• Worked closely with BMO GAM Front Office(including Portfolio Managers), Investment Operations and Charles River Development teams regarding requirements and during UAT of new trade workflows.
• Monitored all the QA activities, test results, leaked defects, root cause analysis and identifying areas of improvement. Implement steps required to improve the processes.
• Actively managed and participated in the UAT testing of Global Trade workflow of all asset types with BMO Investment Operations team, QA and Statestreet.
• Validated and reconciled test files with large volume of data (~120K rows) against StateStreet Security Master file and reports from source systems(MyStateStreet.com) and BMO Prod data extracts for Back Office settlement systems.
• Query(SQL) the MarkitEDM database to validate trade flow, catch issues with trade status, exception etc.
• Supported Defect Management and reporting in Jira, actively led defect triage meetings, support BMO Senior Mgmt. with the latest status.
• Getting signoffs from the Business for their respective interfaces and systems.
• Multiple daily calls with BMO and State Street Business and technology regarding analysis/resolution of issues and status updates
• Train QA members in trade lifecycle in Charles River OMS.
Project : CitcoOne
Platform : Requirement Mgmt, Test Management, UAT, Functional, Integration, Acceptance, Regression and System Testing
Tools : HP ALM, JIRA, Confluence, SQL Developer, AEXEO(Fund Accounting), AXI (Investor Relations),
Investran(SunGuard’s product Private Equity/Real Estate fund administration), SQL
Team Size : 7
CitcoOne is Citco's first alternative investments portal which offers its Investment Managers and global Investors a 360 degrees view of Front, Middle and Back office operations. It presents daily views of Portfolio and custom reports via a dashboard system which is designed to simplify, facilitate, and enhance the analysis of investment, investor and service-related data.
The key features of CitcoOne are :
•Interactive dashboards which provide managers operational workflow visibility, NAV production status, reconciliations status and live views of investor capital activity.
•Order management cycle for various hedge funds from trade entry to trade booking and position consolidation.
•Portfolio management capability with daily views of portfolios, with customizable visualizations and portfolio analysis options.
•Data mining and exploration tools across a variety of financial data metrics.
•A Document Management center, where clients can manage Investor Capital Activity documents, track investor document metrics, and upload documents for investors - all of which includes built-in notification alerts and security preferences.
As the BA-QA, I had the following responsibilities:
•Participate in Sprint Planning and Project meetings for Effort Estimates and Risks, Sprint Review, Retrospectives and feature discussions with Product Owner and Development team.
•Documentation - Business Case, Functional Specification Document (FSD, BRD), Use Case, Epic, Product Backlog, Requirement Traceability
•Review the high-level test plans and test strategies and ensured test cases are in alignment with business goals and deliverables
•Reviewed and created wireframes for webpages of half of the modules of CitcoOne and Documented requirements in Confluence
•Worked closely with Citco Business users and the vendor for requirement elicitation and management
•Participated in Sprint planning, sprint demo, suggested changes in the wireframes based on business inputs
•Supported multiple QA and UAT phases for each sprint and getting sign off from the business
•Active support for prod defects and defect management
•Extensive use of SQL queries to query trade details of different web pages
Project : Variable Annuity Hedging(VAH) - Intraday Risk Monitoring System (IDRMS)
Platform : Risk Management, Functional, Integration, Acceptance and Regression Testing using Waterfall Methodology
Tools : FITNESSE, Quality Center 11.0, HP PPM, SQL Server 2010, MS Visio
Role : UAT Lead/BA
Team Size : 5
Variable Annuity Hedging(VAH) program mitigates equity market risks, interest rate risks, and foreign exchange rate risks embedded through the minimum guarantees in the products. VAH provides a dynamic hedging approach to transfer large portion of liability risks to the market. IDRMS monitors hedging mismatch of variable annuity portfolio (liabilities) and hedging portfolio (assets). The main functions of IDRMS are :
• Calculate variable annuity sensitivities (delta and rho) based on trading grid from valuation engine (Atlas).
• Aggregate and net liability and asset sensitivities
• Calculate limits and test the risk management activities
• Alert traders when aggregate and net sensitivities exceed limit
• Integrate with Derivatives Systems(Findur) for hedging instruments to get up-to-date futures positions data and calculate futures deltas and to get OTC position deltas and rhos.
As the UAT Lead, I had the following duties:
- Requirement management and analysis on the change requests in HP PPM, followed by test plan and test strategy creation.
- Test script creation and execution in Fitnesse and provide sign offs.
- Defect management in QC.
- Train the offshore team in Market Risk concepts, Limit mechanism, Monte-carlo Simulation, Fitnesse scripting etc
Project 2 : FIC(Fixed Income & Currencies) QA
Platform : Functional, Integration and System Testing using Agile Methodology
Tools : Quality Center 10.0 | Jira | Confluence | MS Visio
Role : QA Manager/Business Analyst
Team Size : 13
Client : Royal Bank of Canada (RBC Capital Markets), Toronto
This project provided QA services for the RBC Fixed Income and Currencies web applications and tests the various phases of a front office trade - Trade Entry, Trade Processing, and Trade booking into settlement systems. It also tests the Position Mgmt and consolidation of trades. I worked on and managed the following applications:
• GTC(Global Trade Capture) : Captures all the trades coming from various ECNs and broker channels like Bloomberg, TradeWeb, CM Direct, Market Axess, DealerWeb, Espeed etc. and STPs them to various settlement systems like BATS(Bond Automated Trading System) and TOMS(Trade Order Management System).
• EDDIE(Electronic Distribution, Dealer Intervention and Execution) : Eddie provides price inventory to different Source (trading) systems like BLOOMBERG, MarketAxess, TradeWeb etc. It applies spread on the prices sent by APS & then sends it to the Source (trading) systems.
• CMDirect : CMDirect is the OTC trading Platform of RBC. It allows trading in Foreign Exchange & Fixed Income.
• APS (Automated Pricing System) : Used to price the fixed income securities.
• Guardian: Guardian is a trade entry and reporting system. Guardian compiles money market trade data from multiple sources including RATS, RIBS, ARTS, VISION, Anvil and manually entered deals, and presents it in a consolidated fashion. It provides reporting functions for Risk Management, Asset and Inventory Management, as well as Cash Management and Accounting.
• RATS: It is a settlement system for FX trades.
Project 3 : PH&N IC(Philips Hager & North Investment Council)
Platform : Functional, Integration and Regression Testing using Waterfall Methodology
Tools : Quality Center 10.0
Role : QA Manager / Project Lead
Client : Royal Bank of Canada (RBC Global Asset Management), Toronto
PH&N IC Integration Program was about integrating the RBC Global Asset Management systems with their newly acquired Custodian PHN systems. The purpose of the ECA & IMAP project was to test the automation of ECA transaction load and position reconciliation with 4 external custodians: TD Waterhouse, Scotia Trust, RBC Dexia (Royal Trust), RBC Dominion Securities. It involved the testing the following functionalities:
1. Automation of External Custody Account (ECA) transaction load and position reconciliation:
ECA&IMAP Project will ensure that transaction files from 4 external custodians (RBC Dexia (Royal Trust), Scotia Trust, TD Waterhouse, RBC DS - 323 accounts out of 338) will be automatically loaded into Blackbox to be transformed into SS&C Pacer required fields/formats, with the appropriate entry codes, security identifiers, etc. The transformed transaction files and initial positions for new accounts files will be fed into SS&C Pacer via scheduled jobs. SS&C Pacer will export updated positions for these accounts into Recon DMS, where position files from these external custodians will be reconciled with the positions from SS&C Pacer and the corresponding exception reports will be generated.
2. Investment Management Account Profitability (IMAP) Automation (applies to ECA and non-ECA)
Project 1 : FAST \{Fidessa America Sales Trading - Equities\}
Platform : Functional & Automated Testing using Agile Methodology
Tools : Test Partner 6.0 | Quality Center 9.2 | Java
Team Size : 7
Client : Bank of America (Capital Markets NYC)
Fidessa delivers powerful resilient Order Management and Trading Services to the global dealer community. It covers three main functions:
• TMAR - Trade Management and Routing
• PMAC - Position Management and Consolidation
• Trade Reporting ( OATS, OTS, UNITY systems)
It has the following Main Components:
1. FAST (Fidessa for Americas Sales Trading) : It enables users to smart route client orders according to order type, value size, instrument, counterparty and more. Users can perform Buy, Sell, ShortSell, Amend of Securities and Splitting to different Destinations like SORT, XFM, VWAP, POV etc.
2. UTS (Unified Trading System) : Position Traders receives orders directly from a sales person. They can assign or reassign orders to execution services. They complete the order when they have finished working with it; it may or may not be fully filled.
3. GPK Global Position Keeping) : Position management and consolidation (PMAC) provides the means to calculate, view, and adjust profit and loss information resulting from trade and market activity.
• Defined Test Strategies, planned & lead test case development & execution for Fidessa Trading application at Bank of America.
• Validated FIX protocol messaging for Client Simulator in FAST.
Project 2 : Matter & Document Management (Vendor Payments- OGCPORTAL)
Platform : BEA Web logic Portal 8.1
Technologies : Java/j2EE | Object Oriented Concepts | WLP 8.1 | jsp | Oracle 9i | JavaScript | HTML | XML|Web Services
Role : Java Developer
Tools Used : HP Quality Center 10.0 | PVCS | VSS
Outside Counsel Access (OCA): OCA was designed to create a capability to control law firm expenditures by supporting an effort to drive legal spend to an approved list of law firms. It was intended that by limiting the number of law firms used by Merrill Lynch and driving increased retentions to them more favorable fee arrangements and discounts would result. This project will enable outside law firms to gain access to the ML internal compliance & litigation repository (Teamconnect). TC is the central repository for all the matters that are created & updated for the Legal, Compliance, Litigation & Regulatory & Transactional groups. This enables the outside counsel to have direct yet restricted access to the litigation matters.
Computer Science and Engineering