E-Finance Lab Team

One might think that the success of a financial investment can be measured easily as performance, defined as the return-on-investment between two points in time. However, the accurate calculation can be complex and compute-intensive, e.g., for a single customer but especially for the entire customer base of large institutions like banks. In order to meet these computational demands, grid computing presents a secure, reliable and scalable technology to provide shared access to heterogeneous resources. This research-in-progress paper introduces a service-oriented architecture for portfolio performance measurement that is based on a grid layer. It first emphasizes the importance of performance measurement as success measure and steering tool before the calculation is presented in detail. Since the consolidation of required data is very compute-intensive, different calculation methods are encapsulated. Finally, a service-oriented grid architecture for performance measurement is presented and evaluated using criteria from system engineering and design science.

The financial service industry is one among other industries that request increasingly the use of Grid technology for their intensive computing demand. An achievable way to accelerate the sharing of Grid resources within this sector is the establishment of a pricing mechanism. To strengthen this theory, a simulation with different pricing scenarios has been set up with the indication that price-based allocation of Grid-resources combined with an auction mechanism can lead to a cost reduction of more than 40%. This result shows that there is a huge cost reduction potential in the financial services industry.