Python has developed from an underdog to a major force in Information Technology in general — and in Financial Services in particular. Recently, Dr. Yves J. Hilpisch, Managing Director of Visixion GmbH, gave a talk about applications of Python in Finance at the EuroPython 2011 conference in Florence.
Measured by the number of Python books coming out and by the number of Python conferences organized around the globe (and the people attending these conferences) one can come to only one conclusion: Python has evolved to a major pillar of modern IT architectures and development processes.
Financial applications, e.g. for derivatives valuation or risk management, are known to be computationally demanding. For example, Monte Carlo simulations make it necessary to conduct millions of simulations and more often than not these should be finished within seconds and not minutes or even hours. That is the reason why financial institutions or software vendors in this field generally use compiled programming languages, like C or C++, to ensure the necessary performance of their applications.
Visixion GmbH, a German financial engineering boutique, already started out in 2006 with the aim of building a full-fledged derivatives analytics suite based on Python. At that time, Python was used in the financial area for anything but computational core programming.
The EuroPython 2011 talk of Dr. Yves J. Hilpisch illustrates on the basis of some simple examples how beneficial it is to use Python for financial application development. You find the slides under:
EuroPython 2011 — Derivatives Analytics with Python & Numpy
You can also watch the whole talk on YouTube:
EuroPython 2011 — Video of the Talk
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