Author: Michael Hogers

Software Developer at NPL Markets Ltd. NPL Markets facilitates efficient transactions between buyers and sellers of illiquid portfolios and non-performing loans throughout Europe.

NPL Markets and R Shiny

Our mission at NPL Markets is to enable smart decision-making through innovative trading technology, advanced data analytics and a new comprehensive trading ecosystem. We focus specifically on the illiquid asset market, a market that is partially characterized by its unstructured data.

  Platform Overview


NPL Markets fully embraces R and Shiny to create an interactive platform where sellers and buyers of illiquid credit portfolios can interact with each other and use sophisticated tooling to structure and analyse credit data. 

 Creating such a platform with R Shiny was a challenge, while R Shiny is extremely well suited to analyzing data, it is not entirely a generalist web framework. Perhaps it was not intended as such, but our team at NPL Markets has managed to create an extremely productive setup. 

 Our development setup has a self-build ‘hot reload’ library, which we may release to a wider audience once it is sufficiently tested internally. This library allows us to update front-end and server code on the fly without restarting the entire application.

 In addition to our development setup, our production environment uses robust error handling and reporting, preventing crashes that require an application to restart.

 More generally, we use continuous integration and deployment and automatically create unit tests for any newly created R functions, allowing us to quickly iterate.

If you would like to know more about what we built with R and Shiny, reach out to us via our website www.nplmarkets.com

RXSpreadsheet: a new library for editing spreadsheets with Shiny

The goal of RXSpreadsheet is to create a wrapper for the x-spreadsheet JS library: https://github.com/myliang/x-spreadsheet. The x-spreadsheet JavaScript library is created by https://github.com/myliang and all credit goes to this person. RXSpreadsheet is a lightweight wrapper that allows you to use this library in your Shiny applications (without any JavaScript knowledge).

The editor has most common spreadsheet functionalities such as styling, validation and functions.  You can test RXSpreadsheet by installing the GitHub version with devtools::install_github(‘MichaelHogers/RXSpreadsheet’) and subsequently running RXSpreadsheet::runExample(). This wrapper was made by Jiawei Xu and Michael Hogers. We are aiming for a CRAN release over the coming weeks. Special thanks to NPL Markets for encouraging us to release open source software.