Over 30 years ago, at early 1996, an idea of real-time limit monitoring grow in my mind. The idea felt essential to be able to think the risk numbers, not only filling in manually various risk and P/L figures of the bank on an Excel sheet size of several square meters. Using more than half of the next day in typing the collected yesterday’s numbers on the spread sheet did not make sense to me. Limits should not be controlled the day after. Limits must be monitored in real-time to be able to change the position when reaching the limits and before closing the day, I thought that would be the right approach.
After having discussed my idea of gathering all the transactions in real-time into a system with the bank and with an external software developer, who said yes we can do that, we sat two weeks every day and evening at the bank. We talked and at the same time he developed the code to read the transactions that were transported from the front-office trading system, under my floor, to the back-office settlements and bookkeeping. Yes, my office was physically on a long corridor between the front-office and the back-office, hence my risk control and reporting office was practically called as middle-office. No such term existed those days.
At 16th March 1996, after the two weeks of coding and discussions the unheard real-time risk monitoring and reporting system was kicked going. And it worked. It was able to read every transaction typed in at the front-office and add those to the previous day’s transactions, and to calculate the new transactions into the risk exposures and measure the exposures against the set limits. Wau, the first real-time middle office reporting system was born. Yes, the bank started to call the new system with an abbreviation of the first letters of middle office reporting system, MORS.
The first months after the launch of the first MORS, the functionality developed continuously and all the new versions needed to be tested after the working hours. To be able to do that and to combine my supposed to be evening plan to play with our some months old son and my 40 kg dog, the formula was to get the troops at the office. My lovely wife spent the days with the troops, and needed to get to gym and trainings during the evenings. The second picture is from around 29,5 years ago when the “troops” were packed to the elevator to be driven to the offices, and the first picture is some six months later when the young guy was already capable of participating the evening testing. By that time the dog had seen it all and preferred to sleep under the reporting desk during the testing.
Since those days several system versions were developed, and at 16th February 2006 the system became a company, keeping its original name MORS Software. Today, 30 years after the launching of the system and 20 years after founding the company, many banks around the world do real-time monitoring with MORS, including all of their treasury and banking book transactions, all risks and limits, further more with regulatory required ratios and modelled alternative future time point scenarios of their balance sheet. We have come a long way, still the original thought of monitoring and managing the risks must be done real-time is the same as at the beginning, not just at the day after or occasionally after some month ends. Looking forward and understanding the risks and how to manage those is essential, today even more than ever.
For this tremendously exiting and fun 30 years journey I would like to express my sincere and big THANK YOU to my original colleague Mr. Makkonen (the programmer, mathematician and solution solver) who is my co-founder of MORS Software (the company) and who still is my colleague at the firm, THANK YOU. Goodness, we do not have to do it all anymore by our selves, so THANK YOU to all MORS Team colleagues, you are fantastic. Also my love, gratitude and THANK YOU to my wife Iina, who then 30 years ago transported the “troops” enabling the evening shifts at the testing bench, kept the house in order with the expanded troops, started to build the firm around Makkonen and me, and who today runs the firm as the CEO (who would know better), THANK YOU. Great THANK YOU also to our son Henri for the good testing work and always so positive and interested attitude for the testing evenings, and for Ziki the dog for guarding our evenings at the quiet and empty bank. Naturally, THANK YOU for the bank and all the colleagues at the bank, first in Helsinki and later in Stockholm, London, Singapore, NY and around the bank, THANK YOU all. And finally and most of all the customers for trusting the system and having selected the system for your banks, THANK YOU.
THANK YOU and congratulations MORS 30 y !!!
