CMA Small Systems AB

Leading Provider of High-End Financial Technology

We help our clients from financial services industry gain competitive advantage through design and integration of value-creating IT-solutions. Each solution and implementation is individually tailored to customer's unique requirements for financial institutions such as national banks, depositories, commercial banks, clearing and settlement centres, exchanges and brokerage houses.

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During the last 28 years we have completed 500+ projects worldwide delivering a diverse range of Products:

System architecture design adheres to a modern concept to provide integrated services so these systems installed together may play a role of a platform of financial infrastructure in the country. Due to diversities in local regulations and practices there is a practical demand from Customers to create a financial landscape that takes into account these aspects and specific points. This is why CMA supports various configurations of its systems which include distributed or integrated environments. This means that:

RTGS and ACH systems can be delivered as separate packages with “external” message-based interface (through SWIFT or IP network) or as integrated package that provide RTGS and ACH services together. In former case the ACH and the RTGS systems may run on different hardware environments that may be far away from each other or the systems may run on the same HW installation. In latter case this is one package from the “technical” point of view with support of both RTGS and ACH business processes. Even being integrated in one package, the RTGS and the ACH components still communicate with each other through “internal” message-based interface. It is possible easily to join or separate RTGS and ACH systems if necessary.

The same approach is applied for Depository and Trading systems. Since services provided Depository and Trading system(s) are very different from services provided by RTGS and ACH systems, aggregating Depository, Trading, RTGS and ACH functionalities into a single package has not been implemented.

Integrated financial infrastructure is provided by our system due to:

Harmonized business processes between all systems;
Integrated or synchronized Business day schedule management;
Synchronization of Master data (dictionaries, Participant directories etc.) between systems in distributed environments.

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Project approach

CMA uses unique and efficient project approach to guarantee high level of knowledge transfer and Customer confidence with the system operations and business behavior.

To achieve this CMA uses its methodology STEP/X based on Prince2) that covers all parts of project life cycle. One of strong points is that CMA conducts “familiarization” workshops just after project starts to explain to Customer overall design and different possibilities that system can provide. CMA assigns high-quality specialists to explain and choose together with Customer best options according to internal practices and requirements. The result of this workshop is a common understanding of business and technical configuration that allows CMA to prepare high-quality functional and technical specifications that fulfills Customer demands and makes system customization and configuration. Another point is that CMA puts a very special attention for Market rehearsal and Pilot phase that CMA considers as a key point for knowledge transfer in the system operations by Customer under CMA specialists supervision. Parallel run is proposed as well if applicable (e.g. when CMA replaces application from previous vendor as it happened in Central Bank of Mauritius where CMA replaced Montran RTGS and ACH solutions).

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Design approach

Design principles, architecture and implementation of all systems are compliant with relevant principles and recommendation such as “Principles for financial market infrastructures, CPSS-IOSCO, April 2012”.
All of our systems can communicate with Participants, between each other and with other systems through SWIFT or VPN, or both of them simultaneously. All of our systems support MT and MX messages. CMA Depository and Trading systems may communicate via FIX protocol as well.
All systems include “Integration Bus” that allows ease integration with external applications of financial infrastructure of Customer. “Integration Bus” contains components tools built-in into the systems as well as adapters that play a role of “communicators and translators” between CMA system and external application using a language this application understands.
Each application has a multi-layer structure:

User access layer responsible for User access to the system
Business layer responsible for managing of business processes
Core layer that implements a core functions (like settlement, queuing, suspension, etc.)
Database layer that interacts with database engine
Integration Bus that allows our system to talk to external systems.

This layered structure provides following benefits:

High level of Security: users do not have direct access to the System Core and Database;
Flexibility: customization and configuration of business processes can be localized at Business layer;
Stability and performance: all core functions are managed by solid system Core specifically designed to be fast and stable.

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Functionality

Our approach is to provide modular, high configurable system that allows our Customer to choose from set of options in business model and business processes.

E.g., for cash withdrawal process we support 4 different models, our Customers may choose any of them. Even more, in our projects we are ready to implement new business models according to Customer demands and requirements and these models become available in the system versions. So we can say that we create “self-educating” systems and create a community of Users. This becomes available due to existence of a special layer, “business layer”.

In our RTGS solution among other features we may highlight the following areas of functions that shall be considered as our strong points:

Liquidity management (collateral accounts, ILF limits, reserves, limits etc.);
Advanced facilities for online monitoring by Central Bank and Participants;
Flexible business day schedule management;
Facility to process different type of payments per its “internal” type;
Support of PVP and DVP transactions;
Facility to process any number of Net transactions from any number of sources in different modes (using reserves or not), aggregate queuing transactions for liquidity optimizations etc.

In our ACH solution among other features we may highlight the following areas of functions that shall be considered as our strong points:

Support of a full range of payment instruments: Direct debits, Direct Credits, Cheques, Remittances etc.
Support any number of Clearing session during a day (configurable);
Support different Clearing modes including online Clearing;
Support a wide set of Risk management options: Debit Caps, Bilateral limits, Payment and batch amount thresholds etc.;
Support various Settlement modes (protected, non-protected, protected by guarantors), end-of-session, end-of-day etc.;
Support Mandate management including one off mandates, recurrent mandates etc.;
Retail model where Customers are registered in Clearing system;
Standing orders;
Black lists and AML checks.

In our Depository solution among other features we may highlight the following areas of functions that shall be considered as our strong points:

Retail and wholesale models as well as Custodian services;
Support of all major DVP models: 1,2,3 as well as DVF;
Interconnection with international depositories;
Support of international standards (ISIN, ISO15022, CFI etc.)
Support of a wide set of collaterized operations (ILF, SLF, REPO, SellBuyback, Securities Lending/Borrowing, Loans, Credit lines etc.) that are integrated with our built-in collateral management module (that supports Securities valuation, Market prices, Ratings, Collateral eligibility rules, Collateral Substitution, Margin Calls, Collateral Execution and Default management etc.);
Corporate actions;
Support of Central Counter Party infrastructure;
Support of Equities and related functionality (dividends, split/merge, conversion etc.).

In our Trading solution among other features we may highlight the following areas of functions that shall be considered as our strong points:

Support different types of trading methods: Auctions, Quotations, Standing facilities, anonymous trading, etc.;
Support of wide types of auctions (Dutch, USA, Fixed Rate, Ascending, Descending etc.).

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Connecting Participants

Our strong point is a variety of options to connect Participants. The following components are included into our systems:

STP Gateway that allows Participants to exchange messages between their internal (e.g., Core banking systems) and our system on STP basis. STP gateway can provide communications via VPN or SWIFT;
“Stand-alone” Participant Gateway (installed at Participant side) that allows Participant to implement its own internal document flow scheme (authorizations, approvals, four-eyes etc.) before submitting of final version of transaction to the system integrating this component into its own HW and data environment;
“Shared” Participant Gateway (installed at Central institution side) that allows Participant to implement its own internal document flow scheme (authorizations, approvals, four-eyes etc.) before submitting of final version of transaction to the system using Central Institution HW and data environment;
“Light” Thin client gateway (used typically for monitoring, control and trading purposes) that is connected directly to Central system (via User access layer) and allows immediate online monitoring and control functions.

All components above (except STP Gateway) are WEB-based. Central Institution may choose which option is more suitable for each Participant. Several components may be used by one Participant in parallel.

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Technology

CMA solutions are cross-platform. We are offering full range of payment systems solutions: from low-cost to high-end.

All modern server architectures and operating systems are supported. We have good experience in implementing our software on virtualized environments (full software virtualization or firmware-based) without loss of performance or resiliency. Each and every proposed technical solution is finely elaborated and well thought out without any single point of failure. Fine and comprehensive design of CMA systems ensures smooth service, fault tolerance and fast recovery from any disaster or physical damage. The key features of our systems, which allow us to maintain best recovery time objective:

Redundancy on all levels: hardware, network links, system software configuration, CMA software components, business processes;
CMA Technology is based on built-in clustering approach + External high availability and load balancing tools are used in every solution;
Each solution is distributed across several physical locations with online replication of mission critical data;
Internal recovery tools integrated into CMA software ensure data integrity on business process level after disaster recovery;
Built-in monitoring tools and capabilities of integration with modern enterprise-wide monitoring solutions guarantee fast detection of system issues.

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Security

CMA software is compliant with modern security standards (e.g., ISO 17799:2005 & ISO/IEC 27001) and World Bank / BIS security requirements.

CMA system design is based on the following security principles:

Protection at all levels;
Least privilege in access rights configuration;
Role-based access control;
4 eyes data input;
High level of operations automation.

Each our solution includes PKI as a mandatory component. Incoming/outgoing and internal network traffic is encrypted. Detailed system traces and operation journals provides a full tracking of all action with information “who, when and how”.