Aggregating Data
At this point, you have set up all the relevant pages for stratifying data. The next step is to run the Stratification application engine to generate the instrument pools and aggregate individual instrument data into these pools. You do this by running a jobstream that includes the Stratification application engine in its processing, such as the Financial Performance Measures, or by running the Stratification application engine separately.
After you stratify instrument data into pools, the financial services industry application engines and the financial services industry applications, then use these instrument pools. For example:
The Cash Flow Generator uses these instrument pools to efficiently process large volumes of instrument data.
PeopleSoft Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP) uses these pools to set up FTP rates for a group of instruments.
FTP calls the Stratification application engine whenever the FTP rate is based on the results of the Cash Flow Generator, duration, average life, or strip funding.
PeopleSoft Risk-Weighted Capital (RWC) uses these instrument pools when calculating normalized loss or risk-weighted capital allocations for a group of instruments.
When using the Stratification application engine for cash flow processing, you have several options. You can:
Run the Stratification application engine to aggregate instrument data into pool tables.
You can then run the Cash Flow Generator application engine separately, using as input the instrument pools that are aggregated by the stratification engine.
Run FPM, which combines the Stratification application engine and the Cash Flow Generator application engine (FI_CASHFLOW) into a single jobstream.
Run the Cash Flow Generator application engine without prior stratification of instrument data into pools.
Note: If you run FPM and set up product pricing or prepayment filters on cash flow rules, these filters are evaluated prior to calling the Stratification application engine. For example, you set up a pricing filter assigning a unique pricing rule to instruments with certain financial characteristics. The Stratification application engine ensures that those instruments matching the pricing filter are processed together and are not included in pools with other instruments that are not matching the pricing filter criteria.
There are several advantages to running the Stratification application engine separately rather than through the FPM engine.
First, running the Stratification application engine separately enables you to reuse the pools for subsequent cash flow processing rather than repeatedly stratifying pools every time you run FPM. This trimming of stratification overhead is useful, particularly if the stratification settings are fairly constant and you have frequent modelling changes, because you can turn around analytics more quickly.
Second, through the use of master scenarios and input scenarios, you can divide subsequent cash flow processing into discrete scenarios, each addressed by an analyst who is responsible for a different portion of the portfolio. This option is useful if you want to generate cash flows for different scenarios based on the same instrument pools. By running the Stratification application engine for the master scenario, you generate common instrument pools that act as the basis for subsequent modeling and processing activities. Analysts can then create their own unique scenarios that identify this master scenario as the input scenario. Analysts next run the Cash Flow Generator application engine for their unique scenario to create cash flows that use as source data the pools that are generated for the master scenario. The Cash Flow generator application engine tags the cash flow output with the analyst-specific scenario IDs. To define scenarios and assign input scenarios, use the Scenario ID page.