Global
Case Study
APIX™ Addresses “Excel Paradox” at Tudor Investment Corporation
Executive Summary
Microsoft Excel is ubiquitous on the desktops of financial services companies due to its power and flexibility. However, it is also singled out by regulators and enterprise IT for creating unacceptable, sometimes unmanageable risks as an enterprise data management tool. Facing this “Excel Paradox,” Tudor Investment Corporation engaged Ness to create a platform that would keep Excel on user desktops, but remove the risks of stale data embedded in spreadsheets and the headaches of continuously deploying and updating Add-Ins. APIX™ integrates any API with an associated Swagger document into an Excel first-class citizen. This enables Excel users to call external APIs as if they are native functions, and it removes the need for updating the Add-In when new APIs are released or updated. The platform also provides optional instrumentation and central API management functionality.
About Tudor
Tudor Investment Corporation is a privately-owned group of affiliated companies engaged in the investment management of client and proprietary assets. Tudor manages assets across fixed-income, currency, equity, and commodity asset classes and related derivative instruments in the global markets for an international clientele. The investment strategies of Tudor include, among others, discretionary global macro, quantitative global macro, quantitative equity systems, and event driven equities. Tudor is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, with additional offices in New York, Palm Beach, London, Singapore and Sydney.
The Challenge
- Tudor’s quantitative analysts relied heavily on Microsoft Excel because of its flexibility and built-in analytics.
- They also wanted to take advantage of programming languages like Python, R, and Scala to implement solutions and services.
- However, embedding code directly into Excel created applications that were bloated, difficult to scale, and a challenge for IT to manage.
The Solution
Ness worked with Tudor to develop APIX™, a platform that allows Front Office users to access enterprise data services in a secure, controlled manner. APIX.XL™ is a lightweight, static, client-side plugin for accessing APIs as native Excel functions. With tools to support the rendering and presentation of API output, APIX.XL™ allows Excel users to access a host of critical services via a central, managed, and audited repository. This repository, APIX.Hub™, allows users to expose, promote, and access APIs.
Results and Benefits
With APIX™, Tudor can now convert any API with an associated Swagger document into an Excel-native first-class citizen. Furthermore, Tudor can now access a host of critical services through a central, managed, and audited repository with the convenience of native Excel integration. Enterprise services can be delivered rapidly to the end user, preventing duplication of data and functionality. Last but not least, Tudor does not need to keep releasing updates to its desktops as new APIs are provisioned or existing ones evolve over time.
