Firm Profile: Investment Bank, Alternative Investments

Product: Risk Shell, Database Integration, Custom Development

The Alternative Investment Division (The Division), a part of one of the largest investment banks with over US$1.3 trillion AUM, specializes in seeking to provide a broad range of private market investment solutions to HNWI and institutional investors. The Division's offerings include diversified alternative investment strategies as well as multi-asset portfolios.

ABC Quant Client Since 2014

The Division was looking for a SaaS analytical platform satisfying the following requirements:

• 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;
• a data hub functionality - the system was supposed to integrate data from numerous Division's in-house databases.

Since Risk Shell satisfied all initial requirements, the Division decided to go forward and started a comprehensive Risk Shell security assessment using a 3-rd party IT security firm. After three months of security tests including numerous network penetration tests, Risk Shell was approved as the system meeting all regulatory requirements and the Division started implementing the Risk Shell platform.

Challenges and Solutions: "Exceeded our expectations"

The custom configuration of Risk Shell required creating a data bridge between Risk Shell data servers and the Division's in-house databases. Though the Quant's team had already implemented a number or such data links in the past, this particular case was different due to strict security requirements across the Division's networks. ABC Quant had to develop a unique data transfer protocol that did not require a remote access to the Division's data servers. "We are very pleased with the data solutions implemented by ABC Quant ... the Risk Shell network infrastructure not only resolved our needs, but exceeded our expectations in terms of its flexibility and reliability, " said the Head of IT.

Easy-to-use and Advanced

The investment team of the Division also noted the user friendly interface of Risk Shell and its advanced capabilities. "It takes just a few hours to start using Risk Shell. The interface is intuitive, since all the controls are on a single page... no need to navigate through. What's really important is that we can easily generate advanced portfolio allocations using non-linear optimization or risk budgeting that other vendors do not offer."