Finland’s Oko Bank selects Misys for OTC derivatives

Oko Bank, the central bank for Finland’s co-operative banking community, will extend its use of London-based Misys International Banking Systems’ Opics solution to cover regulated and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives activities.

Opics is already deployed at the bank’s Helsinki head office to support treasury operations. The Microsoft Windows NT-based suite, designed for a client-server environment, went live at the beginning of Q4 2001, replacing the bank’s mpct Solutions-supplied Atlas system.

This first-phase installation included applications to process the bank’s foreign exchange trades, deposits and loans, forward rate agreements, interest rate swaps, as well as the management of nostro/vostro accounts and nostro reconciliation.

“As the European Union’s primary bank in Finland, it was essential for our treasury solution to support the conversion to the euro as the country’s base currency,” said Ville-Pekka Veijola, senior vice-president, treasury & capital market operations at Oko Bank. “Opics provides us with comprehensive coverage of all the treasury instruments traded by the bank, and will enable us to progress towards the straight-through processing (STP) of trades,” he added.

The second phase of the Misys project, which involves the rolling out of applications to handle the bank’s trades in derivative instruments such as over-the-counter (OTC) and exchange-traded options and futures, is due for completion in Q2 this year, following Finland’s conversion to the euro.

The development also includes a range of application programme interfaces (APIs) to integrate Opics with a number of in-house and third-party applications. These systems include the bank’s general ledger, regulatory reporting, data distribution and Swift payment systems. Established in 1902, Oko Bank is the central financial institution for 244 co-operative member banks. It also has a presence in Sweden and representative offices in Estonia and Russia.