Bankers Trust.
Now taken over by Deutsche.

I worked there for 18 months, contracting, great pay, hard work and fantastic fun.

Names I remember.
Philippe Bibi - Analyst
Simon Stanhope - Project Leader Back Office
Ian Gillies - Project Leader Front Office.
Alex Rawson - Programmer/Analyst
Arthur 'Taffy' Ellis - Programmer/Analyst
Gordon Reffell - Programmer/Analyst
plus about 20 more that I cant remember.

Task : Equity Derivatives Trading System.
Location : Appold Street, London & Southwark.


We developed this system from scratch.
Resources used :
Prep - a Bankers Trust product which wrote 'C' code and Vax Basic code from the in-house proprietary product.
DECIntact - a transaction processing sub-system, originally written by Bankers Trust, but so successful DEC bought it.
VAX Basic - a truly wonderfully fast language, both in execution and programming.
Vax 'C'.
VMS - later to become OpenVMS.

The Equity Derivates department, some 40 dealers, had been struggling with a cobbled together system using Access...and not much else. Bankers Trust decided to spend some money on putting this right.

We spent 12 months programming, just to get the infrastructure in place, tested & secure.
Add currency, Remove Stock, Modify Customer, Add Settlement Rule.

Now we had to write to proper business side of things.
See a stock price...press a button and automatically, up on your screen would come...history graphs, risk analysis and finally recommendations...all database driven.

The dealer then had to make a decision...Buy or Sell.

It was looking great, we went into testing...."not fast enough" shrieked Phillippe.

Errrrr...OK....pre-load all common database look ups in Global Sections.

Nope.

Right then....what's slowing us down ?

It's the 'C' modelling.

No problem...put that on an Ultrix box, that's all it will have to do. No time slot problems with the other 600 users.

Hmmmm....still not good. What the hell is wrong ?

Answer...the hard disks weren't fast enough.
Couldn't get the data to the processors fast enough.

Jeez...what can we do ?

Solid state ! OMFG, those things cost a fortune.

"Who cares", they bellowed, "Just get it done, you have an open budget"

We shipped in a couple of 128MB solid sate discs, cost about £125,000 each at the time....ridiculous I know, considering my camera has 128MB removable CF memory...and you can get that for £20 now !

Lets run it all up now.

Press button and.....wham....graphs, analysis and the all important..."BUY/SELL" flag.

We went live, it was an enormous success. Those 40 dealers made £160M profit in ONE year.

Head dealer was given a £4M bonus, not bad for 28 years old.

Seems all a bit unfair, but never mind. I had done my job and I loved it all.
I can't say I did too badly though. I remember putting invoices in for £12,000 a month.
Not surprising there were a few 80 hour weeks in there.

A great experience.