Risk Focus – New York: Risk Focus in partnership with Tudor Investment Corporation (Tudor), announced today the launch of APIX, a revolutionary enterprise API platform for Excel®. Developed for Excel power users, application developers, and data scientists, APIX empowers users to access models, data and analytics APIs through existing Excel-based applications while addressing the concerns of maintainability and compliance typically associated with Excel applications.
Excel is used heavily in the front-office and offers a host of benefits. However, it also presents a number of challenges, particularly in the current regulatory regime. APIX addresses these challenges, allowing financial institutions to continue using Excel, but in a controlled manner. Specifically, APIX:
- Allows for the removal of uncontrolled code from Excel workbooks.
- Enables new services to be deployed and exposed to multiple users and applications without breaching the user’s desktop environment.
- Improves time to market for new services, without sacrificing testing and control.
- Reduces cost and risk associated with critical Excel applications.
The value, availability and utility of APIs in the capital markets is growing rapidly as technology shifts from siloed, homogenous systems to open, self-service, data driven solutions with access to a rich array of data services and functionality, locally and on the Cloud.
APIX, developed by Risk Focus in partnership with Tudor allows Excel power users to access virtually any service through standard Excel-based applications currently used for modeling, pricing, risk and data analytics solutions.
APIX exposes services, written in any programming language, via RESTful endpoints, seamlessly presenting these services as standard Excel functions. APIX consists of three core components:
- APIX Templates: reusable micro-service templates to accelerate projects in the programming language of choice.
- APIX Hub: API repository for registering, discovering and accessing APIs, based on open source technology.
- APIX XL: lightweight, static, client-side plug-in for accessing APIs as Excel functions, with tools to support rendering and presentation of the API response.
Ilya Finkelshteyn, Head of Software at Tudor, said: “The business case for APIX is clear: our quantitative analysts rely heavily on Excel for its flexibility and built-in analytics features and they also want to take advantage of powerful programming languages like Python, R, Scala, etc., to implement solutions and services. Embedding code directly into Excel creates applications which are bloated, difficult to scale and a challenge for IT to manage. APIX provided the solution. We are now able to access a host of critical services through a central, managed and audited repository. Enterprise services can be delivered rapidly to the end user, preventing duplication of data and functionality.”
Srikant Ganesan, Head of Risk and Trade Solutions at Risk Focus, commented: “CTOs and software groups struggle to support Excel-based applications. They don’t scale well and are difficult to secure, audit and deploy to the desktop. Despite this, Excel is widely used by every client we work with. We call this ‘the Excel Paradox’. We developed APIX so that clients could continue to enjoy the richness and flexibility of Excel while accessing the models and data they need through secure, scalable, supportable, auditable APIs.”
Miriam Roiter, Chief Technology Officer of Tudor, said: “We have been partnering with Risk Focus on various initiatives since 2012 and they were the obvious partner to work with on developing this platform. We are excited to extend our partnership further with the launch of APIX. The platform has been extremely successful at Tudor and we trust that Risk Focus will deliver the same success for other capital markets clients.”
