> Grid-Introduction > Examples of Use > FinGrid > Grid-Prototypes

Pricing and Billing of Grid Services

The goal of this prototype is to set up a usage-based charging model for Grid services. Therefore, a stepwise transformation from the current product pricing via a unit pricing towards a market pricing will be conducted. In contrast to traditional monthly resource usage and pricing contracts, on-demand Grid services require and demand an event-centric approach, where the billing event is started by the use of a certain resource and completed by its end. Such a billing schema allows for a flexible and dynamic use of different Grid services to variable costs instead of buying own hardware to high fix.

Customer Portfolio Performance Measurement

The steady increase in importance of measuring performance in the private banking sector has led to performance being the measure not only for reporting but also as basis for performance-related accounting. Therefore, the financial service industry is eager to standardize performance calculations to have sector-wide comparability and to compute standardized benchmarks. The calculation of performance measures for customer portfolios is usually done by using the money-weighted return method and for the key customers of a bank the more sophisticated method called time-weighted return.  Since these two calculation methods are very compute-intensive and therefore very time-consuming, the goal of the prototype is to accelerate the calculations by means of a scalable, Grid-based solution.

Grid-based Asset-backed Securities Factory

The goal of this Grid-based prototype is to efficiently handle and bundle asset-backed securities (ABS) that can be traded on stock exchanges. The approach is to set-up a multi-seller ABS factory under the umbrella of a big state owned savings bank (Landesbank) or a regional savings banking group in order to pool loans of individual Sparkassen in the ABS factory, which operate through a centralized data processing provider. By providing collateral for loans, the saving banks are able to reduce the number of risk-weighted assets on their balance sheet and engage in profitable fee-based transaction business.