Firm Profile: Investment Bank, Alternative Investments

Product: Risk Shell, FoF Manager, Multiple Data Sets, Database Integration, Custom Development

The European Banking Group (The Group) is specialized in investment banking and capital markets. It is the largest banking group in one of the G7 countries with AUM of over US$877 billion. The Group offers a diversified range of services including alternative investments, hedge fund and multi-asset investment portfolios, and research.

ABC Quant Client Since 2014

The Group had been using investment analytics, a well-known desktop platform, from one of the leading financial software vendors for over ten years. Over the years, that desktop platform became outdated and suffered numerous drawbacks, thus could not satisfy requirements of the Group anymore. The Group's requirements to a new system could be summarized as follows:

• a fast and easy migration of the Group's existing data into a new system;
• a complete solution, an all-in-one investment environment that could address the needs of different departments: research, portfolio management, risk compliance, and shadow accounting;
• a highly secure application meeting institutional regulatory requirements;
• a multi-user environment with a controllable access rights across different user groups and geographical locations;
• an advanced analytics capable of addressing peculiarities of alternative investments;
• an advanced analytics for risk assessment of multi-asset portfolios including traditional instruments, hedge funds, derivatives, and equities;
• multiple data vendors - the system was supposed to integrate data from numerous 3-rd party databases.

Since Risk Shell satisfied all initial requirements, the Group started a comprehensive Risk Shell trial across all the departments involved. ABC Quant offered the Group a tailored program of 'guided trials' where Quant's experts were demonstrating how Risk Shell can solve various tasks of the Group's investment process, due diligence and research. Many employees of the Group were directly involved in the trial program and provided valuable feedbacks.  After more than two months of extensive trials, Risk Shell was approved as the system meeting all the requirements and the Group started implementing the Risk Shell environment.

Covers All The Needs: "...the most sophisticated risk and portfolio construction analytics developed today"

The Risk Shell investment environment allowed the Group to integrate research, portfolio management, risk compliance, due diligence, and shadow accounting within a single investment framework delivering an easy interaction across different departments. "Risk Shell integrates the most sophisticated risk and portfolio construction analytics developed today - combined with hedge fund due diligence, CRM and accounting, " said the Portfolio Manager.

Customer Support and Unlimited Development On-demand

To satisfy one of the key Group's requirements, ABC Quant's experts provided a full migration of client's data including thousands of custom instruments, due diligence records, and investment portfolios into Risk Shell. To meet a tight deadline of data migration, the job was assigned a top priority status - it took only 5 days to complete the migration. During the course of the Risk Shell deployment, the Group asked for numerous additions, new functions and improvements to be developed under Quant's development on-demand program. Ont of the important outcomes of these developments was the new Return Adjustment Framework that allowed maintaining two independent layers of data for investment portfolios: vendor's data and user-defined custom data.  "The Risk Shell unlimited custom development on-demand program makes the implementation of our own concepts extremely effective and fast," noted the Portfolio Manager.