Leveraging the development and integration capabilities of Beacon Platform, Beacon’s Financial Object Hierarchy provides a clear and concise method for defining the important elements of almost any financial transaction or portfolio. It’s the backbone of how Beacon works for financial modeling, and each layer is completely customizable and extensible.

Developers and quants can add support for new product innovations, making full use of appropriate change controls and model control methodology. And your end-users will benefit from those enhancements without any bespoke application development.

Figure 1: Beacon’s financial object hierarchy

Core: Beacon’s development platform, including enterprise-scale elastic cloud infrastructure, modern data warehouse, collaborative developer tools, automation services, and a robust and controlled production environment.

Data: Beacon provides standard models, storage services, interfaces, and APIs that simplify handling static, temporal, and bi-temporal data, such as time-series, trade positions, lifecycles, workflows, and reference data.

Markets: Real-time and non-real-time components for working with markets and market data. These give developers easy-to-use solutions to get all the curves, conventions, fixings, surfaces, and calibration parameters needed for financial modeling, including specific market models and asset classes such as equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodities, and crypto currencies.

Instruments: Combining capture of contractual terms with pricing and modeling behavior, Beacon’s Instruments layer enables Quant Developers to develop sophisticated, reusable, valuation and risk analytics for a wide range of types of securities and derivatives.

Positions: Beacon provides straightforward ways to operate on collections of traded instruments, structured into hierarchies of books and portfolios as desired, or built on-the-fly for what-if analysis.

Applications: Visualization (Beacon Plot), pre-trade pricing (Beacon Quote), trade capture and post-trade operations (Trade Blotter) as well as user-defined analytics, risk and P&L reports, and other tools that provide meaning and actions on the firm’s underlying data.