Tony Kobine

I'm a consultant software developer specialising in front office Excel applications for investment banks and asset managers. My business experience covers Fund-of-Funds and Manager-of-Managers Asset Management, Equity Derivatives, Cash Equities, FX and Structured Finance.

I interface directly with traders and fund 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.

Let me take a look at some of your more pressing Excel development needs and I will give you a firm quote for how long the job will take.

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Sample List of Consulting Projects

AXA Architas Multi-Manager– Asset Management

Architas is a specialist investment company focussing on the creation of new multi-manager opportunities for clients in the UK and Europe. I worked closely with the Chief Investment Officer to define the priorities for automating the Front Office of this start-up including daily portfolio valuation and rebalancing, due diligence and analytics for new fund manager selection, performance data collection for ongoing manager monitoring, fund fact sheets, deal tracking workflow and guided architecture. Delivery success was achieved through a hands-on approach combined with developing and maintaining strong relationships across all functions and at all levels within Architas.
  • Designed and coded a proprietary quantitative screening method that analyses 30,000 mutual funds to identify managers whose performance consistently meets criteria specified when setting up a new fund of funds.
  • The conversion of an existing Multi-Manager OEIC utilising a complex aggregation process (Virtual Pooling) with over £1bn of assets under management was the first virtual pooling transfer of its kind for UK regulated funds. Implemented a complete daily rebalancing and cash allocation system that included secure, automated transfer of allocation instructions to the Fund Trustee.
  • Implemented a Middle Office workflow tracking system to monitor the accuracy of work performed by the custodian, transfer agent and third-party fund data suppliers.

Merrill Lynch – Equity Derivatives

Provide tactical Excel-based solutions to the Equity Derivatives business – sales, structurers, traders, middle and back office. Solutions were tactical, filling a need while long-term strategic solutions were being developed. Excel VBA, Reuters, Bloomberg, Fidessa, Trading Screen and a broad range of Merrill’s internal feeds, databases and strategic applications. Office 2007. Developed a client interface to Bloomberg’s Structured Product protocol that automated publication of term sheets to an ftp server and received Bloomberg ID for a new security in under an hour instead of up to two days in the previous manual procedure.

HSBC Investment Bank – FX

Create 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 is a Fixed Income issue whose coupon is tied to the exchange rates of a basket of emerging market currencies. The MTN business has 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

Develop 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 is currently being used internally for ECB rating. I am adding new functionality and ‘productising’ them for use by external customers.

ABN AMRO - MS Office Upgrade

This global investment bank was upgrading from Windows NT / Office 97 to Windows XP / Office XP. I had specific responsibility for converting all user-written applications in Excel (including Market Data apps) to ensure their smooth migration. Managed a team of 6 Data Conversion Analysts supporting the migration of over 1,000 workstations.

AXA Investment Managers - MS Office Upgrade

This asset manager was upgrading 2,500 workstations from Windows NT / Office 97 to Windows XP / Office 2003 with new hardware. I had specific responsibility for all user-written applications in Excel, Access and VB6 to ensure their smooth migration. These applications were written by fund managers and traders to support investment decisions, interface with market data feeds (Bloomberg, Reuters, Thomson Financial’s DataStream) and were mission critical. Upsized Access to SQL Server and thick client VB6/Excel to ASP.NET/SQL Server for the Compliance department. Industrialised applications for Fixed Income and Quants.

AXA Insurance - ERM System

Develop VB and Office 97 application programs under NT front-ending Access, SQL Server 7 and Oracle 8 databases that manage personnel records for several hundred IT staff of this multinational insurance company. Design and implement a skills questionnaire generation and routing system using Excel, Outlook, Exchange, Collaboration Data Objects and Routing Objects. Redesign a large, single-tier application (thick client + Access) to an ASP client, a middle-tier VB COM component and a SQL Server 7 back end. Train staff programmer to take over maintenance and development of the system.

A Real-Time Investment Decision Support System

A small group of private investors, swing- and day-trading the US equities and options markets, required a flexible decision support system to scan real-time data feeds based on their highly personalised trading criteria. Design and write this system in VB and interface it to an Internet trading platform. Design and write a VB program to host Microsoft IE to scan financial news feeds. Web pages are downloaded in a background process, scanned using the Document Object Model (DOM) then stored in a SQL Server 7 database and linked to trading alerts.