Index Engine: Manager and Calculator

Client

Singapore Stock Exchange (2017)

Product team

1x Lead Product Designer and Consultant (me)
1x Lead Product Manager and Consultant
1x Lead Software Engineer and Consultant
1x Client Product Manager
1x Client Designer
2x Client Software Engineer

Opportunity

An index is an aggregation of stocks that represents the health of a specific interest (e.g. SMP 500). The Client engaged us to build a custom index engine to more efficiently manage and calculate indices for the Exchange and its clients.

The vendor solution they had at the time was:

• Expensive 
• Not extensible 
• Had a very long improvement/bug fix cycle (6 months)
• Didn't support all index types

Unsupported indices were calculated in Excel sheets, a manual and arduous process using a tool that wasn't built to handle complex calculations, thus leading to frequent lags, hangs, and crashes. Creating new indices was also an arduous task as it involved setting them up in Excel, which required time and effort due to its manual nature. This frequently led to inaccuracies, and Index Operators often had to reconcile them by checking formulas for each index in Excel multiple times a day.

Outcome

We built a custom index engine that: 

• Reduced manual index management
• Automatically calculated and distributed within 30 mins of index close
• Moved 70% of the Client's indices to the new solution
• Had event-driven error handling
  
• Was auditable
• Supported new methodologies
• And allowed the Client move away from their vendor solution