Case Studies

Solutions Overview

Scenario
The trading floor was encountering numerous problems with their spreadsheets. The sheets were crashing, freezing and displaying inaccurate information. To make matters worse, the traders relied heavily on these sheets to make trading decisions. Willow was hired to analyze and optimize these spreadsheets, and to develop a number of templates, tools and applications to better control and manage the spreadsheets.

Company Profile
The bank is one of the largest financial service organizations in the world. It is a broad-based investment bank serving corporate, institutional and private clients worldwide. The bank is known for its franchise among major corporate, institutional, sovereign and supranational clients.

Situation
Many traders had developed complex and unwieldy spreadsheets, which were difficult to maintain and modify. The sheets continually crashed – disrupting trading throughout the day. The bank attempted to resolve the issue by purchasing larger and more powerful PC’s, but the problems continued. Other applications were reviewed, but the bank’s traders refused to move to another platform, preferring the power and flexibility of Microsoft Excel above all other options. After numerous discussions with Reuters and other potential vendors, the bank turned to Willow to solve their problems.

• Willow created a number of tools, templates, and functions to provide traders with standard methods of access for corporate, historical and real-time information.
  
  
• Frequently used models, analytics and functions were optimized and centralized, reducing errors and standardizing calculations.
  
  
• In addition, Willow developed a number of tools to audit the spreadsheets and control future changes in order to prevent the spreadsheet problems from reoccurring.

The bank has trading floors all over the world – where traders manage their trading activity through a number of standard and ad-hoc spreadsheets augmented by numerous proprietary add-in functions used to calculate complex formulas. The spreadsheets evolved over the years and became unwieldy, slow and unstable. In addition, many spreadsheets were used to publish the bank’s prices to potential buyers. It was imperative that these published prices were accurate and updated in a timely fashion.

The short-term goal was to stabilize the spreadsheets and determine the underlying cause or causes of the problems. Willow developed special auditing and performance monitoring tools to highlight potential problems. Once identified, we developed meaningful solutions and an implementation plan to efficiently resolve the performance issues.

Our implementation plan consisted of a number of steps. First, tools were developed to handle the most common problems, such as eliminating redundant calculations and unnecessary functions. Other tools were added to selectively optimize and standardize the method of data access for real-time, historical and corporate data. Macros, function calls and Add-ins were re-written. Next, standard templates were added for frequently used models and analytics. And lastly, a set of guidelines and controls was established to form the basis of an internal policy directive to help optimize and manage the use of spreadsheets worldwide.