Agence France Locale (AFL), the unique French local government funding agency owned by French local authorities, has today announced it has completed deployment of Orchestrade, the leading modern, cross-asset, front-to-back trading and risk management platform, to lower its operational risk and improve its overall trading and risk management.
AFL is a unique public sector company, which aims to help French local authority funding in the best way possible at the most competitive price. As part of its growth trajectory, AFL wanted to invest in a new financial software package to increase efficiency, reduce costs and achieve its business objectives.
AFL therefore required a single, scalable, modern platform to handle front, middle, risk, operation, and back office, and also be able to meet its specific trade capture and risk management needs. AFL needed a front-to-back solution with a visualized loan process, including acquiring loans and hedging them as they go to market. Selecting the right platform was a significant challenge, and a risk, for AFL, as the system would underpin its existing operations and be vital to enable AFL to continue to grow.
After consulting various software publishers, AFL chose Orchestrade. “Orchestrade’s strengths were its ability to understand AFL’s technical needs and to propose a solution with a competitive quality-price ratio. The platform’s standard functional coverage was good, as well as Orchestrade’s willingness to develop missing interfaces during the project, working alongside AFL’s business and IT teams,” confirmed Olivier Roullé, AFL General Secretary.
Despite the Covid crisis requiring all work to be done remotely, the project continued as planned. Orchestrade delivered portfolio profit and loss analysis and monitoring, alongside asset liability management using behavioural assumptions and new production forecasts, in line with FR-GAAP and IFRS9 accounting metrics. AFL now also uses Orchestrade for treasury optimization to ensure profitability and for its lending processes.
“Following the example of our Nordic counterparts, we are changing our market operations management module for a more suitable front-to-back and asset liability management software package, so we can optimize and secure our processes and develop future new possibilities, such as new products,” according to Thiebaut Julin, AFL’s Chief Financial Officer.
” We at Orchestrade are proud of the role we are playing in helping AFL accomplish its specific mission. With a rich and smart interaction between the different teams involved in the project, we have created a flexible and enhanced user experience, with world class customer support, using cloud-based architecture. Developing and delivering a managed service offering, which met AFL’s specific challenges really showed the breadth, stability, and flexibility of our technology platform. That we could do it in the way AFL wanted and needed gives us a real sense of pride and of a job well done for our client,” said Jean-Daniel Morfin, Head of Product Management at Orchestrade.
About AFL
“The Company’s mission is to embody a responsible finance to strengthen the local world’s empowerment so as to better deliver the present and future needs of its inhabitants.”
By creating our bank, the first one we own and manage, we, the French local authorities, have decided to act to deepen decentralization. Our bank, Agence France Locale (AFL), is a financial institution unlike any other. Created by and for local authorities, it aims to strengthen our freedom, our ability to develop projects and our responsibility as local public bodies. Its culture of prudence spares us from the dangers of complexity and its governance from a downward slide of conflict of interest. The main objective is to provide the local world with access to cost-efficient resources, under total transparency. We are driven by the principles of solidarity and equity. We are convinced that together we go further. We decided that our institution would be agile, addressing all types of local authorities, from the largest regions to the smallest municipalities. We see profit as a means to maximizing public spending, not as an end goal. Through AFL, we support a local world committed to take up social, economic, and environmental challenges. AFL strengthens our empowerment: to carry out projects in our territories, today and tomorrow, to the benefit of our inhabitants. We are proud to have a bank whose development is like us, more responsible and sustainable. We are Agence France Locale.