Italian Bank Rolls Out SunGard Trading System

Italy's Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (Carifirenze) has gone live with Panorama, a trading system from SunGard, after a three month installation process.

The implementation at Carifirenze includes trade processing, payments, confirmations, general ledger postings and regulatory reporting of OTC interest rate derivatives. At project completion, Panorama will provide fully integrated back-office processing for interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives.

Based in Florence, Carifirenze is a large independent retail bank in Tuscany with a network of 420 retail branches. Servicing both its retail and corporate customers' needs, as well as the bank's own funding requirements, the bank operates a dealing room for hedging FX, interest rate and equity risk and execution of client-driven derivative business.

Carifirenze selected Panorama to achieve straight-through processing of its OTC derivative activities, and to provide reporting to the Bank of Italy and real-time entries to its accounting systems.

Panorama will be delivered through a partnership with Banksiel, a Telecom Italia company and systems integrator.

Carifirenze cited Panorama's extensive product coverage, presence in Italy, localized support and its ability to be delivered on a cost-effective ASP basis as key factors behind the decision.

"We were looking for a straightforward way to update our environment and achieve automated compliance with the Bank of Italy's requirements for reporting and for providing accurate data to accounting," said Alessio Fontani, project leader at Carifirenze. "With the first phase of the project delivered, Panorama is already proving its ability to help us increase operating efficiency."