What is this position about?

Join the Rates Platform Functional Support Team within the Global Markets group at BNP Paribas. 

This Level 2 support role offers opportunities to develop advanced IT skills, given that Level 3 support is primarily located in other time zones. 

BNP Paribas' Rates business is a leading player in electronic market activities, encompassing market-making for Bonds and Interest Rate Swaps across various electronic markets. The business also includes client-facing operations, proprietary trading, and futures and options brokerage. 

The eRates Support Team is instrumental in providing support for electronic trading tools utilized by the Rates and Credit business in Asia. The team is crucial to the global workflow, from pricing (using in-house pricers) to the initiation of booking (up to STP) for RFQ, Streaming, and Order flow for both SWAPs and Bonds. Additionally, you will support a multi-asset pricer (Forward Pricer) used by other business lines such as FX FWD and Risk. 

This role involves collaboration with multiple stakeholders, including:

•    Business (Traders + Sales)

•    Research

•    IT teams (Business Analysts + Developers + Project Managers)

Based in Singapore, our primary users are traders, with additional users across 13 sites in the Asia Pacific region. Due to the "Follow the Sun" model, we are equally accountable for the availability of the platforms for users in Europe and America. 

Our systems are deployed globally with major server hubs in London, New York, Singapore, and Tokyo. While most solutions are developed internally, some vendor solutions are also utilized. 

Support staff operates globally on a "Follow the Sun" model, with handovers from New York to London. The Singapore team currently consists of eight members, with three focused on FX and four on Rates, led by one team leader. Although the primary focus of this role is on Rates, a basic understanding of FX is necessary for effective turnover and crisis management.

What would be your typical day at BNPP Paribas look like? 

Shift Rotas in the team for eRates are in place to cover

•    From 6:30am on a rotation basis

•    Bank holiday cover, on a rotation basis;

•    Occasional weekend work (DR drill, major release sanity checks, etc); 

Incident and Problem Management

•    Manage/Own P1/P2 incidents and problems end to end;

•    Communicates with internal users and management over incidents and post-mortems;

•    Diagnoses issues: establishes their root case.;

•    Initiates task force over critical incidents;

•    Liaises with upstream and downstream systems support teams as appropriate; 

Application Monitoring and follow up

•    Responsible for global uptime target of 99.9%, across the whole Rates etrading platform;

•    Responsible for production implementation, troubleshooting and monitoring of Forward Pricer during APAC hrs.

•    Responsible for production implementation, troubleshooting and monitoring of trading applications and market access support of Rates Trading on various APAC markets (Tradeweb, Bloomberg, Market Axess, SFE/ASX, JPX, eSpeed US, BTEC…)

•    Monitors application state and input/output data correctness throughout the day, hand-over with follow the sun support teams;

•    Performs system administration;

•    Support traders, troubleshoot and diagnose functional and technical issues in the production environment 

Knowledge Management and Documentation

•    Documents support procedures on wiki;

•    Owns team knowledge base on wiki for all in-scope applications;

•    Provides support to end-users on how to use the application;

•    Ensures Follow-the-Sun and regional support teams are trained as required, in particular over new releases;

•    Communicates a daily handover document to Follow-The-Sun support teams, where appropriate; 

Continuous Service Level improvement

•    Ensures that all application support logs are fit for purpose, ie meaningful and actionable;

•    Actively seeks reduction of dependency on manual interventions by support staff, e.g leveraging enterprise batch scheduling and enterprise monitoring tools;

•    Implement self-recovery and automated detection of incident leveraging on learnings from past incidents; 

Maintenance and enhancements

•    Participates to release cycles for functional validation on staging/preproduction and production environments;

•    Review release and coordinate around deployment/post release checks;

•    Communicates Release Notes;

As expertize builds up over the years - Project and specific tasks

•    Gather requirements from business users and clarify them in high level specs to dev, then coordinate the deployment with business and development teams;

•    The senior team are also responsible, from an IT perspective, for specific client onboarding on 3rd platform including go-live certification;

•    Various project are also managed by the team, all related to support: most of the tasks are incident response, business request or maintenance;

•    Project can also include management application impact of database or MQ systems migration for example;

What is required for you to succeed?

Financial

•    Good business knowledge of Rates business and electronic trading principles (pricing, STP, valuation etc)

•    Good business knowledge on other fixed income products

•    Willing to learn and go outside the perimeter of knowledge 

Technical and Behavioral Competencies

•    Strong SQL: PL/SQL , Oracle

•    Knowledge of using Windows and Unix commands

•    Development : Excel macro and VBA is a must. Python, C++, java is a plus

•    Monitoring: Autosys, Geneos

•    Knowledgeable in ITIL processes 

Just be aware of:

•    Market Data mechanisms and protocols (RMDS, FIX, TOF)

•    Existence of used technologies: FIX, TCP/IP, TIBRV, MQSeries and other middleware 

Desirable:

•    Experience with ION Trading softwares (MMI, Sysadmin)

•    Experience on trading floor

•    Experience with traders’ pricer support

•    Advanced knowledge of trade lifecycle

•    Advanced knowledge of Swaps, Bonds, Futures products 

Behavioural

•    Flexibility/Adaptability in working hours to cope with the business and team’s needs

•    Analysis and communication

•    Ability to clearly explain technical issues

•    Ability to work under pressure in a changing environment

•    Capability to cope calmly with stressed users facing system issues

•    Strong sense of issue ownership and business accountability

•    Problem solving minded

•    Willingness to learn

•    Strong desire to investigate and resolve issues in the short term (workaround / setting up procedure) and Longer term (participate to the definition of proper fix)

•    Genuine interest in support

•    Interest to work in financial IT and learn the business.

•    Inquisitive mind

•    Good personal organisation to follow up simultaneously a very large number of support issues

•    Understand users’ need and convert them to IT realisable 

Qualifications and Experience 

•    First class degree of top university or engineering school, with strong scientific background - mathematical or/and IT

•    At least 2 years’ experience in a similar role as Front office application support in Rates domain

•    Fluent in written and verbal English.

About BNP PARIBAS

As the leading European Union bank, and one of the world’s largest financial institutions with an uninterrupted presence in the region since 1860, BNP Paribas offers a wide range of financial services for corporate, institutional and private investors spanning corporate and institutional banking, wealth management, asset management and insurance. 

We passionately embrace diversity and are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where all employees are valued and encourage applicants of all backgrounds, including diversity of origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion applicants who may be living with a disability. We have a number of internal employee networks in place to empower our staff to act and challenge the status quo.

•    BNP Paribas PRIDE is highly active in favour of the LGBTQIA+ community

•    BNP Paribas MixCity which fosters better representation of women at all levels of the organization

•    Ability, the mutual aid network for employees with a disability or a disabling or chronic illness

•    BNP Paribas CulturAll which celebrates diverse backgrounds

BNP is committed to financing a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. The Group is a founding member of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and has set up its own Low Carbon Transition Group to support its clients through their energy transitions.

https://careers.apac.bnpparibas/

More information 

BNP Paribas - Diversity & Inclusion Journey

BNP Paribas - The Bank Of Green Changes

Award Obtained

BNPP has won Top employer Europe award in a 10th consecutive year