DLM Finance

THE GOAL

DLM Finance specialises in portfolio and treasury services for fund managers working in valuation, risk management and social impact reporting. Treasury management is a high-risk activity which is strictly regulated by internal and external auditors and requires fund managers to maintain a high level of control over their processes.

DLM needed an automated testing system for Trade Manager, the web-based portfolio and treasury management platform created by its development team to help clients meet their regulatory and compliance requirements. It features modules such as deal capture, cash and liquidity forecasts, valuation calculations, portfolio and risk management, (hedge) accounting and flexible reporting possibilities and also connects to a European Trade repository for regulatory reporting.

This testing application, designed to replace a time-consuming manual update process that had significant potential for mistakes and needed to be carried out multiple times a year, had to enable DLM to prove that Trade Manager was fully compliant with the International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE 3402 Type II), reassuring fund managers of the high quality of the company’s processes.

THE APPROACH

CLEVR, a distributor of low-code and no-code Software-with-a-Service (SWaS) solutions, and the largest global Mendix partner, provided an Application Test Suite (ATS) for use on the Mendix platform to automate testing of the Trade Manager system.

The software allowed DLM to adopt a ‘best practice’ approach to automated testing to ensure completion of regulatory requirements. It enabled a test script to be created for any functionality that could have an impact on the audit and to obtain the required security certification. The test environment was devised to guarantee that users couldn’t view information or use functionality for which they weren’t authorised.

THE RESULTS

Testing showed the scripts provided the correct evidence needed for compliance and regulatory rules, and automated testing allowed DLM to reduce the time spent testing by half. Once DLM’s DevOps team had the evidence that the app could guarantee regulatory compliance and was 100 per cent stable, the Trade Manager app was moved into a live environment. DLM is now able to run a daily test that fulfils its auditing obligations and deploy new software releases faster. Following this pilot, DLM came to consider ATS as an essential part of its development process for Trade Manager and put its time-to-market acceleration to work testing other functions that were either mission-critical or noted as high priority by customers.

CUSTOMER QUOTE

“We run a test suite every night that covers our auditing process. An extra benefit of ATS is that it has reduced our workload by half compared to manual testing”

Agapi Karafoulidou, Mendix developer and ATS tester, DLM Finance