TD Securities is the broker dealer arm of TD Bank and so we focus on more the wholesale side of the business, 
so we deal in fixed income products we deal in equity products, over the counter products.
So TD's culture of innovation is really meant to focus on the art of the possible as it pertains 
to how we build and deliver things for our clients.
What is xVA? xVA is really the calculations that we perform in order to adjust the price on 
a bilateral and over the counter transactions, derivative transactions in most cases, that we do with our counter parties.
xVA is really calculations of the value adjustments for the counter party credit risk as well as 
collateral evaluation adjustments so VA stands for value adjustments and then x stands for all 
of those letters that would proceed the VA in this case.
So one of the key challenges with xVA is that it is a very, very complex set of algorithms in order 
to get these pricing models done properly, and we're given a very limited amount of time in which to do it.
The key business challenge is to stay in line with innovation in the marketplace and competition, 
as well as to keep on top of all of the regulatory requirements.
At the end of the day we realized that public cloud was going to be the best option in order to 
get the capability performance that we needed around compute and at the same time keep costs of 
infrastructures low. And so with those criteria, it helped guide us towards Microsoft Azure for 
this particular project
Being in the public cloud allows us to expand and contract as needed as well as change the configuration 
of the infrastructure almost on demand and that allows us to iterate very quickly through different 
solutions and find the right fit for the business problem or for the client almost at no notice 
and respond to the client demands on the spot.
We're able to burst our workload, get what we needed from it and then when we're not running effectively 
the meter stops going.
When you look at the bank of the future or the investment bank of the future, when I think about the 
skill set and capabilities I want to grow inside TD Securities, it's not really around how to build 
great infrastructures.
There are a lot of partners out there that are great at that. Microsoft is an example of one of them, 
and so really the way this enables us is it begins to move us to a better model where we focus much 
more on what we need to do for our client, and we leave the infrastructure management up to the experts.
