Tony Kobine

I'm a consultant software developer specialising in Excel and Access for investment banks and asset managers. My business experience covers Credit Risk, Equity Derivatives, Cash Equities, FX, Structured Products and Asset Management(Fund-of-Funds and Manager-of-Managers).

I interface directly with traders and business managers to understand their requirements then return regularly to confirm that their application is developing in the way that they want. I also interface with other interested parties––quants, structurers, risk managers, market data, middle and back office, for example––to secure the infrastructure components, analytics, data feeds, controls and reporting that the application requires.

In addition to designing, implementing and testing code, I manage end-to-end production of user documentation, Help files and training courses.

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Sample List of Consulting Projects

Bank of America – Investment Banking

Provided the EMEA Credit desk with tactical applications supporting corporate bond and CDS flow trading. Applications included risk metrics, restricted list, aged inventory, sales credits, bond static database, index trade booking, cash volume MIS, price verification, PnL forecasting, time series retrieval and charting. Developed trading strategy enhancements in anticipation of new regulation and increasing transparency. Developed tools to uncover potential strategies and frameworks to validate and back-test these tools before they were deployed to traders.

Lloyds Banking Group – Investment Banking

Enhanced an Asset Backed Securities surveillance reporting system used by the Front Office. Continued the development of a complex platform using MS Access and MS Excel to retrieve data from internal & external sources and store/transform it for trader and manager reporting. RMBS, CLO Arbitrage, CLO SME, Credit Cards. Automated a daily email advising traders of ratings changes.

Deutsche Bank – Investment Banking

Developed solutions to support the Transaction Management Group in the Global Finance & Foreign Exchange Business. TMG works with Trade Support to identify and escalate risk while working with users to find reasonable solutions to close gaps. Built systems in Excel, Access, Notes and SharePoint to automate and enhance existing manual processes, particularly those conducted by the offshore report-generation subsidiary. Created and deployed a Global system for tracking and reporting daily Cancellations, Corrections and Amendments to FX trades to responsible supervisors. Automated a manual system reporting Nostro breaks in FX Cash and Money Market accounts allowing a weekly report to be prepared daily. Automated a tracking system for non-confirming counterparties in London and extended it to work in APAC.

AXA Architas Multi-Manager – Asset Management

Front Office Application Developer. Analyse all IT requirements for the Front Office for Fund of Funds and Manager of Managers. Recommend solutions. Design and implement them in co-operation with AXA central IT. Daily portfolio valuation and rebalancing, due diligence and analytics for new fund manager selection, performance data collection for ongoing manager monitoring, virtual pooling, fund fact sheets, dealing tickets and Middle Office deal tracking workflow. Complete daily rebalancing and cash allocation system for the £1bn of virtual pooling and segregated mandates transferred after acquisition from another bank. Lipper Hindsight automation, Style Research, State Street Securt Transfer client, My StateStreet PostProcessor. Office 2007.

Merrill Lynch – Equity Derivatives

Provided tactical Excel-based solutions to the entire Equity Derivatives business – sales, structurers, traders, middle and back office. Solutions covered the full range of business activity - pricing, booking and risk, execution, contribution and market access, exchange reporting, restricted list feed and analytics delivery. Solutions tended to be highly tactical and often served to fill a need while a long-term strategic solution was being developed. Excel VBA, Reuters, Bloomberg, Fidessa, Trading Screen and a broad range of internal feeds, databases and strategic applications.

HSBC Investment Bank – FX

Created an intraday pricing system to support a secondary market in Medium Term Notes (MTNs) by publishing mark-to-market prices to Bloomberg, Reuters and the HSBC DMDS internal market database. The asset class was a Fixed Income issue whose coupon was tied to the exchange rates of a basket of emerging market currencies. The MTN business had grown rapidly and ad hoc, per deal pricing could no longer satisfy Sales’ requirements for quotations. An analysis of all trades for the purpose of categorising them then building standard pricing templates for each trade type was first performed then the system was implemented using Excel, VBA, Reuters InsertLink and Spreadsheet Publisher, Bloomberg PriceLink.

Developed a Straight Through Processing methodology for booking top-ups and buy-backs of the above MTNs into Murex by intercepting, saving and modifying MXML to save repetitive re-entry of trade economics.

Barclays Capital – Exotic Equity Derivatives

Developed the Equities Derivatives pricing sheet of Merlin+, a global framework for pricing and risking derivatives trades and provides a single platform for generating prices and risk for derivative deals across Fixed Income derivatives, Equity Derivatives, Commodity Derivatives, Emerging Market Derivatives & FX Derivatives. This single platform is supported and enhanced by teams in London, New York & Asia. Calculations can be run locally or distributed across PCs, in a remote server farm, to greatly improve the speed of risk generation.

Standard & Poor’s – Structured Finance

Standard & Poor's is the world's foremost provider of independent credit ratings, indices, risk evaluation, investment research, data and valuations. I was retained by the Structured Finance department to create a rating product for European Covered Bond (ECB) issuers. A suite of Excel workbooks was being used internally for ECB rating. I added new functionality and ‘productised’ the suite for use by external customers.