Business experts examine and change business rules using a tool named bFAST™ Modeling Tool. bFAST™ lets BE's define new business object types, their attributes, relationships and behavior in an easy to understand and straight-forward way. The various kinds of rules that bFAST™ edits are called "metadata", because bFAST™ treats them like data, but they define operational data like securities, trades and positions. MetaBooks™ acts like a database, and the rules that are edited in bFAST™ act like both a schema for that database and programs that operate on the database.
One of the key kinds of object is a transaction, which is an object that represents a financial event. Typical transactions in a financial trading system are “trades”, “liquidations”, and “mark to market”. Each transaction creates “entries” that get posted into “books”. For example a system for a hedge fund will have an Inventory Book, which describes the positions of each security, an Accounting Book, which gives the standard double-entry view of the business’s financial position, and an Investor Book, which keeps track of how much each investor has invested and the profit each has made. A different kind of business would have a different set of books and entries. But different hedge funds will make different kinds of investments, so the Inventory Book could differ from one hedge fund to another. bFAST™ makes it easy for non-programmers to define new transactions or to change their effects. Moreover, MetaBooks™ automatically provides cancel/correct, an audit trail, and tools for exploring the system to discover why it produces a particular result. MetaBooks™ automates much of what programmers do in traditional business systems.
Data import is important to all financial systems. A large corporation will have many interlocking financial systems, and a new system must communicate with them. An IT system for a small company must communicate with those of other companies; for example, a hedge fund’s IT system must communicate with banks, brokers and fund administrators. bFAST™ makes it easy for BE's to define how data imports are translated into objects in the system, usually transactions. Thus, an application can be connected to new sources of data by BE's without traditional programming. The data can come over the Internet, from databases, from spreadsheets; from nearly any source. If the data is financial then bFAST™ makes it easy to import.
bFAST™ also makes it easy to control how data is presented. Currently the main UI for applications built with MetaBooks™ is web based. This means, of course, that it is easy to host applications in the cloud. But it would be possible to generate other kinds of interfaces, perhaps one tailored towards mobile phones, or one for voice. Each type of object can have one or more “presentations”, and presentations are defined at a high level that is easy for non-programmers to understand and easier to move to new kinds of user interfaces, not in terms of low-level languages like HTML.
