Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), in partnership with SoftSolutions, has successfully completed the full go-live of the nexRates trading platform. Covering both derivatives and cash bonds, this deployment marks a major milestone in RBI’s strategic transition to a cloud-native trading infrastructure.
The move to nexRates represents a significant advancement in RBI’s fixed income capabilities, enhancing control over pricing, execution efficiency, and market connectivity, fully aligned with the bank’s “Cloud First” policy.
Why RBI Chose nexRates
The decision to transition from RBI’s legacy system to nexRates was driven by several critical needs:
- Platform-level support for strategic initiatives such as IRS trading
- Fulfilment of essential business demands, including automated trade negotiation, comprehensive hedging workflows, and integrated Business Intelligence.
- A critical requirement to significantly improve time-to-market for new features.
The two partners summarized the collaboration succinctly:
RBI: “We view SoftSolutions as the perfect partner to achieve our ambitious business targets. The strength of SoftSolutions’ product enables RBI to respond efficiently to complex pricing requests from our sophisticated institutional client base.
As RBI pursues both infrastructure harmonization and ongoing digitalization, SoftSolutions remains essential for achieving these key objectives. We look forward to fruitful cooperation, confident that this synergy will drive even greater success and growth.” Harald Müller, Head of Group Capital Markets at RBI
SoftSolutions: “We thank RBI an outstanding collaboration, professionalism, and commitment. They acted not merely as clients but as genuine partners, enabling us to enhance and refine our product beyond expectations. This partnership exemplifies how close cooperation drives continuous improvement and delivers exceptional outcomes.” Giovanni Esmanech, CEO of SoftSolutions.
This endorsement underscores the strength of the partnership and the effectiveness of SoftSolutions in delivering robust, timely, and strategically aligned solutions.
Rapid and Successful Migration
In an ambitious timeframe of just 6 months, RBI and SoftSolutions successfully migrated:
- 1,300 financial instruments
- 6,000 quote configurations
- Integration of 2 major market data providers
- Re-connection of 8 trading interfaces
- Implementation of Straight-Through Processing (STP) for 5 RBI Group entities
The full range of environments – including development, testing, user acceptance (UAT), and production – was seamlessly deployed to the cloud, highlighting nexRates’ scalability, responsiveness, and flexibility.
Key Strategic Achievements
- Cloud-Native Implementation: Fully aligned with RBI’s “Cloud First” vision, infrastructure and connectivity were migrated to the cloud in under 3 months—a core achievement of the project.
- Expanded Market Coverage: Trading capability was extended to new venues, notably MarketAxess (for Austrian and EU supranational Treasury Bills) and Tradeweb for derivatives.
- Operational Simplification: SoftSolutions now serves as a single vendor managing both infrastructure and connectivity, significantly reducing operational complexity.
- Future Enhancements: Integration of advanced Business Intelligence, automated hedging functionalities, and customized pricing strategies are slated for upcoming phases.
The collaboration between RBI and SoftSolutions continues to advance, with the next phase centered around further automation, intelligent analytics, and increased trading agility.
About Raiffeisen Bank International
RBI regards Austria, where it operates as a leading corporate and investment bank, and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as its home market. 11 markets in the region are covered by subsidiary banks, and the RBI Group also includes numerous other financial services companies, for example in the areas of leasing, asset management and M&A.
Around 43,000 employees serve 18.2 million customers in around 1,400 branches, the vast majority of which are in the CEE region. The RBI share is listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange. The regional Raiffeisen banks hold around 61.2 percent of RBI, with the remainder in free float. Within the Raiffeisen Banking Group, RBI is the central institution of the regional Raiffeisen banks and other affiliated credit institutions. For more information, visit: https://www.rbinternational.com
About SoftSolutions
Founded in 1997 by Roberto Cocchi, SoftSolutions is an information technology company specialising in regulated financial markets, with a particular focus on public sector bond issuance. For over 25 years, the company has provided advanced technology solutions to global and regional financial institutions, supporting the evolution of electronic trading and fixed-income management platforms. SoftSolutions was the first company to provide technology for connecting to MTS—the first pan-European secondary market for fixed income—and continues to drive innovation in the sector.
For more information, visit: www.softsolutions.it
