The Future of Trading Systems?

Harnessing the collective power of Excel

The Future of Trading Systems?

The proliferation of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in the capital markets front office has brought many benefits to trading desks worldwide - not least the speed and flexibility needed to bring products to market quickly and efficiently, thereby maximizing profitability and market share. However, Excel's dominance has also presented issues. In some organizations, spreadsheets are running out of control, creating operational and financial risks and posing problems for security and regulatory compliance. A new future may now be in prospect for trading systems - a future in which the flexibility and familiarity of Excel is maintained, but the current devolved fragmentation of spreadsheets is replaced by more centralized control, thereby reducing risk and opening up opportunities for higher revenues and lower costs. At the core of this potential new model is Microsoft's Excel Services, a new technology offering enabling Excel spreadsheets to be scaled across user groups, calculations to be efficiently computed on the server, and change to be locked down' through centralized authorization. Trading Systems may evolve from prototype spreadsheets to fully deployed enterprise supported applications without the need for long costly and risky systems implementation programs. Will this be the future of trading systems? There are clear challenges on the path from legacy stand-alone Excel to this new server side variant, but we now believe it is an option the capital markets players should seriously consider.

The traders' tool of choice

Excel is popular across many sectors...but nowhere has it gained such a strong stranglehold as on the city trading floors.

Across the capital markets industry, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet has become traders' undisputed tool of choice for financial modeling, pricing calculations, and managing risk. Clearly, Excel is popular across many sectors, from education to small businesses to multinationals. But nowhere has it gained such a strong stranglehold as on the citys trading floors. The fact is that capital markets institutions depend crucially on Excel spreadsheets for designing and processing fast, accurate calculations to support trading decisions. Every working day, institutions including brokerage houses, investment banks, asset and wealth managers, and hedge funds use Excel to analyze risk, value portfolios, set product pricing, run simulations, and make business decisions. All over the world, capital markets firms use Excel to develop new instruments, from equity derivatives to structured credit products. They do so because Excel offers a fast and easily-accessible mechanism for keeping abreast of rapid change, by enabling ideas to be quickly converted into reusable functionality. The flexibility and speed of development that Excel offers, coupled with the relatively low level of technical knowledge and experience required to build applications rich in functionality, have positioned Excel as arguably the number one trading tool in the world. When the low acquisition costs of the technology are also taken into account, it is clear that Excel delivers a truly exceptional return on investment. In short, Excel is cheap, adaptive, and gets new ideas to market quickly.

Meeting front-office needs... As a result of these inherent advantages, the usage of Excel in capital markets has not only become pervasive, but has extended to a remarkable degree of breadth and depth. From the perspective of the end-to-end trade lifecycle, Excel now touches every key stage [see Figure 1]. While Excel's influence in the front office is all-encompassing, it does vary by area. An industry survey by ClusterSeven1, a specialist developer of enterprise spreadsheet management software, illustrates the areas of the front office where Excel has achieved the deepest penetration [see Figure 2].

All over the world, capital markets firms use Excel to develop new instruments, from equity derivatives to structured credit products.

In short, Excel is cheap, adaptive, and gets new ideas to market quickly.

1. Operational Spreadsheets: a growing awareness" by Ralph Baxter, Director, ClusterSeven

Figure 1: Excel usage

Pricing: Generate House price, connect Excel to in-house analytics libraries and inbound market data feeds. Manage price and quotes contributions to market directly from Excel using APIs Excel Dependency: High

Trade Booking: Trade details exported to excel-based Trade Tickets. Trade entry for complex products often fed from spreadsheet to mainstream systems Excel Dependency: Medium

Risk Mgmt: Risk libraries, incl trade data and user parameters, used to view and control desk exposure. Volumes of Excel use are particularly high for new or highly complex products Excel Dependency: High

Pre Trade Product Structuring/ Development

Post Trade

Research

CRM Risk Management Lifecycle Management Settlement Cash Management Accounting & PnL

Trade Capture

Pricing

Trade Execution

Trade Booking

Confirmation

Product Creation: Excel is the cornerstone of new model creation & regression testing. These models can easily be amended to adjust pricing to account for particular risk factors specific to a client Excel Dependency: Medium

Trade Execution: In-house & 3rd party execution products typically provide Excel interface, enabling dealer to trade direct from spreadsheet Excel Dependency: Medium

Lifecycle Mgmt: Excel often used in place of Event Mgmt application to track and manage trade events, market events and Calendar Events such as fixing dates, cashflows and expiries Excel Dependency: High

Source: Accenture research, Accenture Capital Markets

Figure 2: Spreadsheet usage within the front office

New business analysis and support Investment appraisal New product/instrument creation Position management Pricing and valuations (e.g. pricing tool) P&L calculation Risk and/or portfolio simulation Risk calculation

9 11 9 9 9 8 25 18 0% 10% Never 20% 30% 46 40% 50% 23 9 9 11 9 18 36 23 38

91 78 73 64 55 46 37 36 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Occasionally

Frequently

Very frequently

Source: ClusterSeven

Traders and quants work together closely to build models in accelerated timeframes, combining market, reference and trade data in Excel spreadsheets that wrap analytical libraries.

The headlong growth of Excel usage in capital markets reflects the constant and intensifying pressure on the front office to simultaneously bring new products to markets, exploit potential windows of high profitability, and establish long term market presence. Traders and quantitative analysts (quants) work together closely to build models in accelerated timeframes, combining market, reference and trade data in spreadsheets that wrap analytical libraries. The widespread and constant creation of these prototype Excel spreadsheets is commonly justified by technology departments, who describe them as specifications for development teams who will - at some unspecified future date - build the functionality into existing tactical enterprise systems (see Figure 3). Why traders love Excel Traders love Excel - and have done so for several years. According to Dr Michael Newberry, EMEA Product Manager of High Performance Computing at Microsoft, there are now 400,000 installations of Excel being used globally by traders. And this number is rising all the time, with many hundreds more Excel-based applications being created every day. Excel's underlying advantages are clear. It is a tool with which everyone is familiar, from ten-year-old schoolchildren to senior executives. Alongside its familiar and user-friendly interface, Excel has a strong, flexible and proven calculation engine, and does not require complex programming techniques. These advantages have seen it become

It is not only new product innovation that follows this design methodology, but often simple enhancements, advances in price modeling, or acquisition of new market data. All of these can be developed rapidly using Excel by the desk teams, with a view to assimilating them to the enterprise platform at a later date.

Inevitably, the time-lag between the conception of a new product and the subsequent integration into the enterprise-wide IT infrastructure results in these temporary Excel spreadsheets being used for extended periods

ubiquitous among the global business community. However, Excel really comes into its own on the trading-floor. A good example is its use within the world of derivatives and structured products, where it has become a major component in the arsenal employed by traders faced with the need to create and trade the most complex and esoteric of deals. In this competitive environment, where being first to market can sharply enhance both margins and market share, Excel often forms the backbone of the trade capture, pricing, and risk management systems.

Figure 3: The time-lag between new product conception and integration into the enterprise system

1. Trader creates new complex derivative product

2. Trader and quants create spreadsheet to price and book new trades

3. First Trade Trade undertaken with Risk and PnL calculated off spreadsheet.

4. Risk calculated off spreadsheet with new trades continuing to be booked on spreadsheets

5. Control function puts a booking freeze on Product due to excessive operational risk

6. Front office IT integrate product into the strategic trading systems

Operational Risk

Time

Source: Accenture research, Accenture Capital Markets

The strengths that have made Excel so popular - its flexibility and speed of development are the very factors that are now increasingly presenting support and management issues that can result in serious operational risks to the organization.

Inevitably, the time-lag between the conception of a new product or technique and the subsequent integration into the enterprise-wide IT infrastructure results in these temporary Excel spreadsheets being used for extended periods by the trading desk to price and risk-manage live trades. New products and techniques are constantly being introduced, and trading volumes in some of them expands rapidly. So if the rate of introduction outpaces the speed with which technology departments are industrializing the existing Excel tools, more and more products are left to be risk-managed by Excel-based tools. Such a situation is far from ideal. Clear and present dangers The proliferation of Excel-based tools across the industry raises clear and present dangers, both for trading desks themselves and for the institutions that run them.

At root, the problem is that existing Excel spreadsheets are virtually impossible to control centrally. The strengths that have made Excel so popular - its flexibility and speed of development - are the very factors that are now increasingly presenting support and management issues that can result in serious operational risks to the organization. The sheer volumes of business-critical spreadsheets used by the front office, and the speed and ease with which new bespoke instances can be created, mean that validating all pricing and risk calculations as fit for purpose' becomes extremely difficult. This exposes the business to the danger of incorrect risk assessments, not to mention audit and compliance infringements. Cells can be changed without creating audit trails, and spreadsheets can be e-mailed across the enterprise and even to external customers - putting the bank's intellectual property at risk.

the limitations of Excel have resulted in the inability of front offices to trade new asset classes and continue trading in maturing asset classes when they have breached approved volumes from controlled functions.

In addition to the challenge of controlling the validity of Excel-based tools, there is also the desktop nature of the tools and the computational limitations that this brings. Organizations have numerous ingenious mechanisms designed to harness the computational power needed to undertake all the calculations required for end of day risk calculations. But there is everincreasing pressure to improve the performance of the calculations in Excel, and the ability to meet this need is fundamentally limited by the underlying desktop architecture being used to conduct the computations. In some cases the limitations of Excel, the architecture and the resultant lack of computational performance have resulted in the inability of front offices to trade new asset classes. Given these issues, it is not surprising that the front office's love affair with Excel is not shared by most investment banks' technology and support functions. In general, IT departments do not regard Excel as proper' enterprise technology, but as a quick and easy desktop calculation tool. In their view, users across the trading-floor have created spreadsheet mania, and IT itself now faces the challenge of regaining control. The problem is however, that the ongoing proliferation of spreadsheets means that the goal to regain control is often receding rather than getting nearer.

Investment banks' technology departments currently face a threefold challenge: to manage and control the validity of Excel spreadsheet based tools; to preserve one golden source of pricing truth; and to increase the speed and accuracy with which these tools can be incorporated into the existing enterprise IT infrastructure to meet the constant demand for improved performance, scalability and stability. The hunt is on for a solution that will meet these three challenges.

The problem is however, that the ongoing proliferation of spreadsheets means that the goal to regain control is often receding rather than getting nearer.

Regaining control: Excel Services

It appears to offer the potential for a workable solution whilst still offering the prospect of retaining Excel's flexibility and the look and feel that are so loved by traders.

From an IT department's point of view, if Excel spreadsheets must be used, the ideal solution would enable the centralization of processing and control over these spreadsheets onto a server. This in turn would enable the bank to harness the collective power of Excel tools across the organization, turning the problem of spreadsheet mania into a positive asset effectively creating a new and powerful shared resource capable of boosting revenues, reducing costs and mitigating operational risk. With Microsoft's launch of Excel Services as part of its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offering, it seems that just such a solution may now be to hand. Excel Services introduces a new way to develop and deploy Excel built applications under the .NET framework, and provides the ability to run Excel spreadsheets on the server side. As such, it appears to offer the potential for a workable solution to the challenges with Excel faced by front-office technology functions, whilst still offering the prospect of retaining the application's flexibility and the look and feel that are so loved by traders. Put simply, Excel Services enables spreadsheets to be uploaded to the server for sharing using a range of methods including Web Services and dynamically rendered web pages. These distribution mechanisms and server side execution require calculations to be described not in the legacy Excel manner by visual basic applications (VBA), but through user defined functions (UDFs) written using .NET technology. This move from VBA to .NET is the fundamental enabler for server side management and allocation, and for distributed computation.

The result is a major change from current desk development practices. The new process would start with the creation of a spreadsheet and upload to the server by an authorized person. The new spreadsheet functionality would then be made available to all authorized users through a number of different mechanisms: rendered as HTML using a Web browser; programmatic interface via the Excel Web Services API; or downloaded as a complete spreadsheet for desktop use. The key feature is that the general end user does not have the ability to alter or modify the shared spreadsheet on the server without authorization and auditable change control. This new process opens up a wide range of benefits. The move to server side control protects the integrity of spreadsheets, including their data and computations, mitigating the risks around validating all pricing and risk calculations. Security is vastly improved, through the ability to authenticate and control which users can see and change which data, restrict the distribution of spreadsheets across and beyond the organization, and reduce the likelihood that users will carry business-critical spreadsheets and data around on their laptops.

The technology behind Excel Services Excel Services is a component of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, enabling Excel applications to be stored and run on the server side rather than the desktop, and providing the ability to lock down spreadsheets centrally. By deploying the new version of Microsoft Office onto desktop computers, and Excel Services on the server under SharePoint Server 2007, the IT function can ensure that rather than users having their own version of a spreadsheet on their desktop PC, they share the spreadsheet via the server. After calculation of the formulas in the Excel workbooks, the results can be offered to the user over HTTP via a Web Browser or as Web Services. Excel Services handles the necessary communication between the Web tier

and business layer, and load-balances the requests made to Excel Calculation Services. Within this overall process, the role of Excel Calculation Services is to load Excel workbooks, calculate them, call custom code (user-defined functions - UDF) and refresh the required external data. It also maintains the session state for interactivity. If desired, the Application Server can be distributed using Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) or a comparable offering, opening up the potential for high performance Excel computation. The overall approach provides two key benefits: a single enterprise-wide source of data for a particular activity, and a server side space where all computations are performed. As a result, performance problems can be addressed centrally rather than having

to be tackled individually on each user's desktop. Further benefits are provided as Excel Services technology is built on the new SharePoint Server 2007 platform which in turn includes Windows Workflow Services. This technology enables workflows to be designed for a spreadsheet to centrally manage publication and amendments. The ability to define a workflow around spreadsheets helps reduce operational risk by: 1) Ensuring centralized sign off of change 2) Providing notification of change events to major stakeholders and risk/control departments 3) Maintaining a full audit trail of modifications

Clients
Internet Explorer

3rd Party Software Component

Web Server Web

Excel Web Access Excel Web Services

Application Server Business y UDF Library

Excel Calculation Services

Data
External Data Sources

SharePoint Content DB. Excel Spreadsheet

Retaining the new business logic created by desk developers allows technology functions to easily reuse the code and libraries in their enterprise systems.

It provides a vision where spreadsheets evolve into production applications removing the need for long, costly and risky implications.

However, the really key benefit in terms of operational risk is that moving spreadsheets to the central server puts IT in control of each calculation in each spreadsheet. Trading desks today have a wide range of spreadsheets containing a vast array of quant code, analytics and pricing calculations. As market conditions and pricing methodologies change, there is a risk that spreadsheets may get out of date, resulting in a price being published and trades executed against it -under an obsolete calculation method. This is a major operational and financial risk that Excel Services can help to mitigate. The new process is also far more scalable (see information panel). And the ability to lock models down and control them centrally for formal transaction processes presents substantial regulatory compliance benefits in guaranteeing the accuracy of the data going into financial controls (see Figure 4).

There are further benefits at the enterprise level. Retaining the new UDF business logic created by desk developers allows technology functions to easily reuse the .NET libraries in their enterprise systems. It provides a vision where spreadsheets evolve into production applications removing the need for long, costly and risky implications. And on a commercial level, having a central version of the truth - and a central version of each calculation - means trading desks and the institutions owning them can be faster and more confident in their response to changes in market conditions and customer demand. This in turn contributes to greater flexibility and responsiveness, helping to build differentiation in the marketplace and competitive edge. As a result, the reduction in the risk profile is likely to be accompanied by a rise in revenues.

Figure 4: New process flow with Excel Services

1. Trader creates new complex derivative product

2. Trader and quants create spreadsheet to price and book new trades

3. UDF and Analytics deployed and spreadsheet published to sharepoint DB.

4. First Trade undertaken with Risk and PnL calculated using central analytic from Excel Services.

5. Second trade, third trade etc. etc Solution scales and all code centrally managed.

6. Front office IT integrate UDF quickly into the strategic Net trading systems

Operational Risk

Time

Source: Accenture Research

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Scalability and performance: a key benefit for derivatives For derivatives trading, a further key benefit of the Excel Services technology is its scalability. Derivatives is an area of capital markets characterized by rapid growth in new products requiring complex bespoke calculations. The need to bring these products to market quickly and price them effectively has seen Excel become the tool of choice. If the first couple of trades in the new product are successful, then trading transaction volumes can escalate dramatically. However, unless the product's pricing computation is implemented quickly and accurately on the enterprise system, the risk management across all these trades may still be dependent on the original Excel spreadsheet that was thrown together at the start - and which may be copied across to different desktops as trading takes off, creating expanding operational risks. What is needed is a technology platform that is scalable enough to keep pace with the growth in the business value of the product, based on a single shared source of data and computations. Excel Services can deliver this, by starting with an enterprise-level .NET implementation that enables scalability and smooth growth, rather than requiring a big

bang' as the spreadsheet and its computations are re-implemented on the enterprise system. Excel Services is intended to be used by multiple users and as such, it has a multi threading model that is designed around running several requests from different users. Traditionally, Excel spreadsheets have been computationally distributed using third party vendors like Platform Symphony (www.platform.com) and DataSynapse (www.datasynapse.com) but Excel Services offers the option of distribution with Compute Cluster. By running Excel Services on each node of a Compute Cluster a flexible and scalable distributed computing solution can be easily built. There are significant overheads - setting up job scheduling, licensing costs, and external libraries require .NET wrappers - but fundamentally, Excel Services offers a quick and easy mechanism for distribution and performance enhancement.

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Conversion: A hurdle on the road

Capital markets players face a dilemma. Even if a standardized methodology is applied to the process, the risks and costs of converting legacy spreadsheets to UDF may not be justifiable: yet starting again from scratch with a new UDF platform risks losing a wealth of intellectual property, accrued business knowledge, and value in the existing spreadsheets. A workable compromise may be to set a threshold based on explicit criteria high computation content, multiple users, business criticality in terms of risk and/or pricing calculations - and only convert those spreadsheets that meet this threshold. Irrespective of the chosen approach to conversion, the fact remains that continued proliferation of VBA spreadsheets is simply storing up problems for the future; problems that will need to be addressed at some stage. Halting this proliferation sooner rather than later will avoid a re-run of the situation facing those investment banks that adopted the NeXT platform in the early 1990s, many of whom are still trying to move applications off the technology ten years after support for it was withdrawn.

Halting this proliferation sooner rather than later will avoid a re-run of the situation facing those investment banks that adopted the NeXT platform in the early 1990s, many of whom are still trying to move applications off the technology ten years after support for it was withdrawn.

While the benefits of moving to Excel Services may appear clear, there are inevitably hurdles on the way. As we mentioned above, the new version of Excel that runs under Excel Services uses UDF rather than VBA technology. There is potential effort and cost involved in converting the existing mass of Excel spreadsheets from the legacy VBA to the UDF required for server side control. Microsoft has already confirmed that it plans to stop supporting VBA, so this is a challenge that will ultimately face all organizations using Excel. The problem is that the process of conversion from VBA to UDF is nontrivial and - currently - both time and skill-intensive. In many cases, the challenges are compounded by the fact that the VBA code was written in a rush against tight market deadlines and is not well-documented. This increases the risk that some elements of a calculation could be lost in the transition to UDF.

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The death of VBA Since its introduction in 1993, VBA has allowed Microsoft Office and Excel to conquer more of the business IT space then many would ever have predicted. From its humble beginnings as a simple spreadsheet application, Excel is now at the core of a bewildering array of solutions from simple financial records to complex trading and risk management spreadsheets - all taking advantage of the flexibility and ease of use of VBA. However, there are mounting threats to the dominance of VBA, and with good reason. Corporate IT departments are demanding greater levels of control and auditing, and many businesses are keen to harness the power of new technologies such as grid computing and web services. Companies also worry about the cost of creating a system twice; firstly in VBA and then as a full enterprise system, and complain that this duplication is an unnecessary waste of effort.

The latest version of Office for the Mac will discontinue support for VBA entirely, and with the PC version of the popular Office suite now supporting .NET development with advanced features such as Excel Services and the VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) environment, many are beginning to wonder if the time is not right to follow in the footsteps of Visual Basic 6 and make the move to the .NET platform. Certainly, although support for VBA macros will continue for the next couple of years, those wishing to leverage the latest developments both in the individual applications such as Excel, and through deep integrations with systems such as the latest incarnation of SharePoint will find an ever increasing pressure to move away from VBA to .NET - Microsoft's preferred, and best supported development platform for Office.

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Exploring the benefits In our view, Excel Services appears to offer a potential answer to the problems faced by technology departments within investment banks and wider capital market players as the volume of derivatives products continues to rise and the number of Excel spreadsheets used across the front office continues to grow. To understand if this technology is a viable foundation for a trading platform, Accenture's Capital Markets Solutions Group have recently been engaged on a project to explore the potential and demonstrate the benefits of the Excel Services technology in a capital markets trading environment. The project was able to answer two main questions: 1) Is Excel Services a viable platform on which to build a scalable and performant enterprise derivatives trading systems?

2) What methodology and tools are required to port an existing spreadsheet with extensive VBA, wrapped C++ analytics libraries and connections to external data sources to the new Excel Services architecture? At the time of writing, the project has been running successfully for a number of months and has defined a robust and thread-safe three tiered extendable architecture and built a server side spreadsheet based fixed income derivatives trading system from the bottom up using UDF. Our aim was to examine the feasibility of using this new technology in a trading situation, and to discover the issues and difficulties with building a trading platform with Excel Services, scaling the risk calculations, and running overnight batches using Microsoft Compute Cluster Server. This is now complete.

The system provides both a browser interface and Web Service API. The browser approach is, in reality, only suitable for users with well defined requirements that are unlikely to change frequently. In the scenario where a trader wants to use a server side libraries from within their spreadsheet to, for example, build their own custom pricing model within a play-pen' environment they can interface directly through the programmatic interface of Excel Web Services API. This method provides an excellent way to achieve the balance of flexibility over control. The project is now addressing the problems involved with porting existing Excel spreadsheets with VBA to the new architecture. A reusable methodology and tool set have been developed that can provide accelerators to the controlled transformation of front office Excel spreadsheets to a future state Excel Services platform.

Screenshot of the systems Bond Calculator

Some architectural decisions made by the project team.

.UDFs

Any.NET language .NET Methods Calls

.dll(cir)

Interop Layer

Managed C++ Class Library .NET Interop Services

.dll(cir)

Core Functionality

QuantLib in C++

.dll(Win 32)

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Next steps: Inaction is not an option

The position is clear. Excel is currently embedded within the front office trading environment. But as well as presenting a number of operational problems and risks, the legacy VBAbased Excel that is continuing to proliferate in trading desks globally is now a burning platform. This means doing nothing is not a viable choice. Excel has won its dominant position for several reasons - not least that it provides a degree of flexibility and ease of use that enables the rapid transformation of ideas into reusable functionality. Given this background, it is not surprising that getting the front office business to part with their beloved Excel, which is critical to their daily quest for profit, has proven to be extremely difficult. Now Excel Services offers the prospect of a less combative approach - one that enables the organization to harness and target the power for Excel more effectively, rather than trying to tackle and suppress spreadsheet mania' head-on. Technology departments no longer need to fight with the front office to remove Excel from the stack, Excel Services offers an opportunity to continue to embrace the fundamental building block of Excel, but with the added bonus of strategically moving the front office business away from numerous unmanaged desktop tools, to a more controlled environment with the added benefits of server side performance.

Of course, there are hurdles. The technology is still immature; performance and concurrent scalability across a cluster requires considerable engineering and expertise; and there is a clear programming paradigm shift required by the desk development teams to move away from VBA to .NET defined libraries while still providing rapid development. However, as the new SharePoint technology matures and is adopted within capital markets institutions or organizations for their standard information sharing, there will be a clear opportunity to embrace the world of Excel Services within the front office. In our view this offers a compelling vision for the trading platform of the future. Traders will be happy that their love affair with Excel is not over. IT functions will be content that this relationship will now be more longdistance than before. Excels place as a fundamental building block for Trading Systems is uncertain, however capital markets firms seeking the future should consider Excel Services as a genuine contender.

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Contacts

Dean Jayson Accenture Financial Services Capital Markets +44 20 7844 8295 +44 795 841 4692 dean.l.jayson@accenture.com

Dominic Stanyer Accenture Financial Services Capital Markets +44 20 7844 2981 +44 797 326 4962 dominic.s.stanyer@accenture.com

Michael Cheek Accenture Financial Services Capital Markets +44 20 7844 9351 +44 797 757 3330 michael.cheek@accenture.com

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About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world's most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With 178,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$19.70 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2007. Its home page is www.accenture.com

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