Commercial Uses: Going functional on exotic trades

A peak into how derivatives trading works at Barclay's and their supporting Haskell application.

QOTD

As we performed the work outside of a traditional it team, management was willing to take a risk on something that promised a good fit and rapid development process.

Abstract

The Functional Payout Framework, fpf, is a Haskell application that uses an embedded domain specific functional language to represent and process exotic financial derivatives. Whereas scripting languages for pricing exotic derivatives are common in banking, fpf uses multiple interpretations to not only price such trades, but also to analyse the scripts to provide lifecycle support and more. This paper discusses fpf in relation to the wider trading workflow, and our experiences in using a functional language in such a system as both an implementation language and a domain-specific language.

The paper is here.