International Project Management Firm Uses Xcelsius(R) Software to Reduce Broker-Dealers' Exposure to Billions of Dollars in Credit Default Swap Obligations

NEW YORK, Aug. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Makosi, an international project management firm, is using SAP(R) BusinessObjects(TM) business intelligence (BI) solutions to provide better visibility into its work with global financial institutions. Makosi uses Xcelsius(R) software, the SAP dashboarding and data visualization solution, to help its clients identify trading compliance risks and flag those that are most immediate and severe. In doing so, it has helped large broker-dealers reduce their exposure to billions of dollars of liabilities and comply with federal electronic-filing regulations. Xcelsius helped enable Makosi to better manage its own teams of consultants, prioritize tasks, cut back on manual processes and increase productivity.

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The collapse of the credit market has created new problems and risks for broker-dealers, companies that trade securities for their own accounts or on the behalf of their customers. Today, broker-dealers are turning to project-management specialists like Makosi to help them identify their biggest credit risks, comply with current government mandates and avoid reputation and financial losses. After years of using manual, spreadsheet-based processes to monitor the progress of its consultant teams, Makosi selected the Xcelsius data visualization tool for its interactive analytics and dashboards and to gain a real-time view of key metrics that impact its broker-dealer clients. It also knew it could benefit from the software's ability to scale and handle high volumes of data in different formats from different sources.

"Before using Xcelsius, we knew we offered our clients the best consulting experts in the financial, accounting and operational consulting markets," said Darren Isaacs, chief executive officer, Makosi. "But what we didn't have was a way to track individual and overall progress, increase efficiency, and most importantly prioritize tasks by identifying trades that posed the highest risk to our broker-dealer clients."

Makosi Uses BI to Clear Thousands of Trades for a Large Broker-Dealer

A large broker-dealer recently worked with Makosi to manage risks associated with its thousands of credit default swap (CDS) contracts - contracts that existed only as unconfirmed, paper-based transactions as opposed to electronically filed ones.