UI Travel Leverages OpenLink's Findur

Open Link Financial, Inc., a provider of cross-asset trading, risk management and operations processing software, announced that TUI Travel PLC, (TUI), a travel leisure conglomerate that owns airlines, hotels, resorts, cruise ships, and tour businesses, went into live production with Findur.

Findur is OpenLink's fully integrated financial markets solution, offering a straight-through-processing (STP) environment that supports the entire transaction management life cycle, covering a comprehensive list of instruments.

According to a release, TUI needed a single, integrated Treasury / Commodity management system to manage, control, analyse and report their financial exposures and positions. TUI was able to go to into production within eight months - from the design phase, beginning in September 2008, and finishing in mid-April 2009.

TUI currently operates more than 150 aircraft - and given that the volatility of foreign exchange (FX) rates and fuel prices has greatly increased in the past two years, the level of exposure presented TUI with significant earnings and an asset risks. The need to effectively manage these increasing risks, coupled with a stronger focus on cash management, was crucial to TUI's financial performance. It was of critical importance that the solution use a single database, with multi-site access interfaces to banks, Reuters (FX and bond data) and Platts (jet fuel pricing), to provide the functionality needed to deliver hedge accounting and advanced market risk assessment capabilities as well as user-friendly reporting.

OpenLink's CEO Kevin Hesselbirg said, "We are very pleased that OpenLink was the vendor of choice, providing TUI with the Findur solution. With its leading Treasury and Commodity management capabilities, it was the "best of breed" application that TUI had been seeking and was the alternative to the existing disparate legacy systems that were not integrated, and did not provide TUI with the requisite tools required to properly manage their financial and operational risks."

TUI Travel is focused on providing Central, Northern and Western European customers with a wide choice of differentiated and flexible travel experiences.

OpenLink is a developer of cross-asset trading, risk management, and related operational and portfolio management software.

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