Mutant Technologies sounds like some kind of computer games company yet it is an e-commerce venture design application for wholesale financial markets.
The founder is Paul Ellis, who was head of exotic derivatives at BZW, the previous incarnation of Barclays Capital. He made a quarter of the profits for the whole derivatives group in 1995 but resigned in August 1996 while new head of global markets Bob Diamond went about his cull.
Mutant was set up the following year to take advantage of the changes Ellis and his fellow executives had witnessed in the credit markets in particular and in the derivatives market in general. The dominant feature of these changes in derivatives, reads the firm's literature, "has been increasing integration across traditional business lines. The application of derivative techniques to financial transactions has meant the unbundling of risk components in hitherto discrete products. As these risks become managed as a group across a wide range of products, the traditional concepts of product development and control have become increasingly problematic in practice."
This has led firms to re-examine how best to sell and deliver such products and to manage them more effectively.