Instrument Box is a software component designed to complete a third system with derivatives and structured product management capabilities. Instrument Box is not an application. It is an embeddable component, designed to be integrated in existing applications.
Instrument Box incorporates the most advanced technologies used by LexiFi itself to build LexiFi Apropos, its flagship end-user product.
Delivery of Instrument Box comes with privileged access to consulting resources by the same engineers who created and designed LexiFi’s innovative technologies. An extensive technology transfer program is also available. Learn more and discover our explainer video about Instrument Box!
LexiFi Apropos is an application for business end-users
LexiFi Instrument Box is a software component designed for commercial software editors or internal developers of financial institutions to include LexiFi’s functionality into their own project
LexiFi Apropos is a complete application, built of course on top of LexiFi Instrument Box. It is an example of a (big) application that leverages LexiFi Instrument Box provided functionalities. LexiFi Apropos wraps these functionalities into a system with graphical user interfaces, a centralized database, reporting capabilities, workflows etc. making it a full-featured application.
LexiFi Instrument Box on the other hand is a library to be embedded by programmers or developers into their own code. In order to maximise genericity, orthogonality and exhaustiveness, LexiFi has endeavored to define very precisely all contract manipulations and related concepts. All these different aspects are exposed as a library with a minimalistic but powerful API, accessible by any third-party application. Depending on the needs and wishes of LexiFi’s clients, it may or may not include LexiFi’s analytic capabilities, but typically includes all life-cycle management features. It may be configured with different programming language interfaces, as a static or dynamic library, as a server, etc., but the features and conceptual API always remain the same.
For example, Bloomberg decided to replace an existing derivatives library in favor of LexiFi’s Instrument Box for building their new DLIB service, mainly in order to benefit from this kind of automatic life-cycle management. Read more about Bloomberg’s DLIB
Bloomberg’s DLIB, Simcorp’s Xpressinstruments, Luma, Ostrum, Fact and other financial institutions and financial technology companies have adopted Instrument box. See our Monthly Focus about Instrument Box implementation and Learn more about clients!
Instrument Box can be delivered in many forms, including as a static or dynamic library to be linked with C/C++ applications, as .Net or Java component, as a stand-alone server, etc. LexiFi currently supports Linux and Windows on x86/amd64 architectures (support for other systems on demand). Learn more
The entry-screen API maps a product description into a high-level description of a Graphical User Interface for editing the parameters of that product.
This description can be interpreted by various GUI “backends”, thus allowing smooth integration in the application user interface and look-and-feel. LexiFi provides a default HTML/Javascript GUI backend, which enables quick integration (either for a web-based application, or through an embedded web browser on a desktop client) and can itself be quite easily customised (through CSS and Javascript). Other backends can be developed by the customer with or without the help of LexiFi. Learn more
Instrument box can be delivered with advanced analytics. Depending on the needs and wishes of LexiFi’s clients, it may or may not include all LexiFi’s analytic capabilities, but typically includes all life-cycle management features.
It may be configured with different programming language interfaces, as a static or dynamic library, as a server, etc., but the features and conceptual API always remain the same. Learn more
Genericity, minimality, powered by LexiFi’s abstractions and deep finance domain specific knowledge guarantee an intuitive and easy to assimilate set of API entry points. Some of our Instrument Box customers work with no more than 10 or 15 entry points!
Through a knowledge transfer program, clients’ developers learn from LexiFi experts the concepts needed to use this stateless API. Note that programming with Instrument Box does not require any specific knowledge of the particular instruments supported (the list of which typically evolving through the evolution of a project). The same is true about particular pricing models supported.
Moreover, LexiFi provides an extended, specific “LexiFi Apropos for Instrument Box developers” to Instrument Box clients. It provides exports directly in Instrument Box compatible formats, and gives access to specific pages for discovering interactively Instrument Box’s features.
LexiFi provides a wide range of robust pricing models covering most (combinations of) asset classes.
These models can be readily used with the pricing scripts generated by the Instrument Box. Calibration routines are also available for these models.
Customers can also provide their own in-house (or third-party) Monte Carlo pricers. Provided these pricers are not specific to a certain payoff, they can often be easily adapted to work with pricing scripts, using a well-documented Monte Carlo pricer API. Learn more about our pricing models
No, you aren’t. Firstly, contract management and life-cycle execution are independent of pricing. But even on the quantitative part, LexiFi distinguishes clearly the pricing framework (pricing code compilation technology, market data query generation, etc.) from the actual implementation of pricing models. The latter can be done by LexiFi’s client who want to “keep their model implementations”. Only minor modifications of these model implementations are typically necessary for making them compatible with LexiFi’s generated pricing code.
Some of our Instrument Box customers have succesfully chosen this path.