SkySparc

400% | Four times more testing for upgrade in 25% of the time

About Sampo Group

Sampo Group is made up of the parent company, Sampo plc, and If P&C Insurance Holding Ltd and Mandatum Life Insurance Company, its fully owned and administered subsidiaries. Mandatum Life Insurance Company operates in Finland under the brand name Mandatum Life, and also has a Baltic subsidiary. If P&C Insurance Holding Ltd owns subsidiaries in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries. Sampo Group runs Wallstreet Suite for its asset management operations. Sampo plc and Mandatum Life have used the system for more than ten years. If began building its in-house asset management capabilities several years ago after previously outsourcing this function.

Challenge

Sampo Group was already using SkyREPORT to improve reporting capabilities and rapidly compile complex reports for business analysis and compliance purposes. But Sampo Group also wanted to build better processes for managing and testing upgrades to Wallstreet Suite and other IT infrastructure within its operations. When any of its infrastructure was upgraded - from databases to operating systems or Wallstreet Suite patches and version upgrades – Sampo Group had previously tested Wallstreet Suite views and reports manually to find potential problems. But this was slow and not comprehensive enough for its needs. With a number of upgrades planned for the short and medium term future, Sampo Group wanted a way to automate its testing where possible, and introduce standard processes and tools to make it faster and more effective. It also wanted to test a more comprehensive set of test transactions before completing the upgrade to reduce the chance of errors impacting its business.

Solution

Sampo Group first decided to use SkyREPORT based on SkySparc’s reputation as a market leader for enhancing the reporting capabilities of Wallstreet Suite. But the group soon realised that SkyREPORT’s automated testing functionality could also help it streamline its upcoming upgrade of Wallstreet Suite version 6.5.3.3 to version 6.5.12.1 – a move the group was making to bring itself up to date with the most recent 6.5 version.

Anders Eriksson, system and process manager at If, says he initially thought the ability to reconcile reports generated by the reference system and the upgrade test implementation would be the biggest benefit of using the versatile SkyREPORT. "But we soon found out that the transaction loading in SkyREPORT was the thing that would save us the most time," he says. "We could have entered the transactions manually. But there are always errors when you do that, and discrepancy between entered data sets."

SkyREPORT enables the creation of scenarios comprising model instruments, portfolios and trading actions that can be loaded simultaneously into the reference and the upgrade test databases. They can be replayed easily into Wallstreet Suite to check that existing functionality and fixes have worked. And they can also be modified and replayed on subsequent testing days or future upgrade projects. SkySparc Professional Services spent only a few days implementing the testing environment for Sampo Group. The project team were quickly able to learn SkyREPORT’s transaction loading and testing capabilities, get user feedback on what were the most critical views and reports, build the transaction library and scripts, and begin testing.

A simplified list of the comprehensive testing steps Sampo Group undertook includes:

• Get users to define what views and reports are commonly used.
• List financial instruments and related data accessed from inside and outside Wallstreet Suite, such as pricing for bonds marked to a curve or a spread.
• List frequently run processes for activities such as fixing, redemptions and other corporate actions.
• Use this information to build testing scenarios that include common portfolio changes, including multi-step transactions.
• Build up the model environment, load up the test scenarios and play these transactions throughout the test cycle day. Change and replay for subsequent days.
• Run the reporting package, including a combination of Transaction data, Treasury Monitor views and Report Generator reports. Examine discrepancies between the current and test systems.

Result

"We thought it would be a really good idea to use SkyREPORT for our testing needs and really learn the product – not just doing set up for this project but also reusing our learning and testing models on future upgrades," says Eriksson. "The experience turned out even better than we first expected. With SkyREPORT’s automated testing capabilities we get testing of a wide range of instrument types and multiple, complex buy and sell transactions. The richness of the testing scenarios we can build, incorporating data from any financial instrument, system or trading activity, really sets SkyREPORT apart. We get documentation of what we have tested and we have a framework now that can be used for any future patch or version upgrades. We now have such good test scripts and documentation ready that we can do any future patch upgrade to Wallstreet Suite in just two weeks with two people at If – a 75% reduction in time. Previously it would have taken eight weeks for two people," says Eriksson.

The solution and processes can be applied to surrounding IT infrastructure too. In fact, Sampo Group has done an upgrade of the database underlying Wallstreet Suite, and were able to fully test the impact on its trading operations for If in just two days with two people, and in three days with two people for Sampo – much shorter than it would have been without SkyREPORT. More long-term, Sampo Group expects to upgrade from Wallstreet Suite 6.5 to Wallstreet Suite version 7, and the best practices and library of scenarios it has developed with SkyREPORT will also make that upgrade much easier.