Deutsche Bank is the largest bank in world. Every day up to $1 billion worth of trades are carried out by its various teams of traders located around the world. At any one time the Bank may have live positions in the market totaling some $50 billion. Naturally these positions carry a degree of risk that needs to be carefully monitored.

Until recently this monitoring was managed by various disparate applications worldwide, most notably a single user MS Access based system that communicated with other such systems by means of FTP and text files. 

A decision was made to develop a global client/server risk management system to replace these various applications.  MS Visual Basic was to be used for front-end development.

Looking for the Right Tools

One of the main concerns of the business users was that any new application should provide them with at least the flexibility of the system that was to be replaced. MS Access allows users to easily manipulate data, alter table definitions and create reports.

The development team realized early on that much of the data would be displayed in some form of grid.  It was therefore very important that whichever grid control was used offered the maximum functionality available. 

An evaluation took place over a period of two weeks, in which every major Grid component was used in a test application.  At the end of that period one control stood out above the others - Janus GridEX.

This control is now used extensively throughout the application (there are some 21 instances of it to be found in a dozen or so dialogs).  It is without doubt one of the major reasons the application was so favorably received by the users.

Deutsche Bank's Risk Management System

The Benefits

One of the prime reasons this component endeared itself to much with the development team was the excellent service provided by Janus.  Lead Developer Mike Grabsky says “We would e-mail support requests to Janus in the afternoon and replies would be waiting for us first thing next morning.  Not only were the replies well written but on most occasions they had even written the necessary code for us!” 

One of the control's most interesting features (one which the users employ extensively) is its ability to group records on one or more of the displayed columns.