Citigroup’s launch of it PRISM tool

For the April issue of Waters, we looked at visualization technology and Citigroup's launch of it PRISM tool. Waters spoke with Citi's Chandresh Iyer about the tool and its evolving use.

What were your customers asking you for that led to Prism's development?

Iyer: We set about asking, "What are our clients asking us for?" More and more clients were asking us to help them with getting better insight and transparency into their investments: where do those investments reside, what are the underlying holdings, what are some of the characteristics of their investments relative to performance and risk.

Based on them asking those questions, we started thinking about what's the best way to deliver that information. Historically, in this space, a lot of this information has been provided in the form of reports or static data. Our view was, with the cycle time of news and the need for getting information so fast, we needed to create something that is much more amenable to how people deal with information in this day and age. It needs to fit within their cycle time, within their workflow, so to speak.

We did a scan of the marketplace and thought about what traders use from a front office trading perspective. If you look at a trader's workstation, it has many screens, indicators going red and green depending trading the trading criteria that are in place.

So we felt that the best way to address this need for timely, transparent information is to have more trading and front-office type tools. So we set about leveraging what is already in place in some of these front-end trading workstations and we used the concept of heat maps. We deployed heat-mapping technology, and more so from the standpoint of dynamic, interactive, visualization. It's not a static report. It's dynamic in the sense that you can use the information for actionable decisions.

How does Prism advance the ball for visualization's evolution?

Iyer: For the first time ever we've created a linkage of information across the front office and the back office. If you think about it historically, the front office doesn't really care about what goes on in the back office. Meanwhile, the back office can be a significant source of operational risk and has to be looked at on a consistent basis.

In order to get a real value of information you have to integrate the front office and the back office information in a uniform manner to provide active intelligence; which is what we've done with PRISM.

Why was visualization an afterthought prior to 2008?

Iyer: Everyone was growing, revenues were growing, the industry was growing and nobody even thought about these types of issues. Now there is much more compression and massive deleveraging and risk has a price. In this environment, it's important to focus on those operations of performance and technology that create loss of performance.