HVB’s US operations upgrade with Front Arena

HVB Americas, the US arm of Germany’s HVB Group, is upgrading to SunGard’s Front Capital Arena version 2.0, to ensure the smooth start-up of a new business in Bermuda. HVB Americas said it needed the latest product since older Arena versions were incompatible with the now-critical thin-client, remote-access technology of Citrix.

HVB Americas is moving its global risk transfer business to Grand Central Re, a structured reinsurance business started by the bank and Bermuda’s Max Re Capital.

Concurrent with the launch of Grand Central Re, the bank also hopes to conclude a five-year straight-through processing integration project using SeeBeyond’s e*Gate Integrator framework, said Christopher Wrenn, chief operating officer for HVB Americas.

Grand Central Re’s credit business will go live on November 1, using a small new data centre, where Arena and self-developed risk management applications will go live for between 40 and 60 users at sites in Bermuda, New York, London and Singapore. They will log in to the Bermuda Arena licence to price structured credit derivatives, Wrenn said.

“We’re going to [use] Citrix 3.4 because the user base will be geographically dispersed,” Wrenn said. “The older version of Arena was not compatible with Citrix.”

The older New York-based version of Arena will run in parallel with version 2.0 in Bermuda throughout October, Wrenn said. Version 2.0 also represents a functionality upgrade, including fully automated trade flow, improvements to credit hedging techniques and improved historical valuation support, said Pam Pecs Cytron, the new US managing director for Front, who re-joined SunGard on April 1 after a stint as executive vice-president of global sales at Netik.