In this article, David Kelly, Director of Credit Products at Quantifi, discusses how the credit crisis and regulatory responses have forced banks to update their counterparty risk management processes substantially. New regulations in the form of Basel III, the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. and European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) have dramatically increased capital requirements for counterparty credit risk. CVA desks have been developed in response to crisis-driven regulations for improved counterparty risk management. How do these centralized groups differ from traditional approaches to manage counterparty risk, and what types of data and analytical challenges do they face?

As noted, the Finance domain provides many good candidates for vectorization. A particularly good example is the aggregation of Credit Value Adjustment (CVA) and other measures of counterparty risk. The most common general purpose approach to calculation of CVA is based on a Monte-Carlo simulation of the distribution of forward values for all derivative trades with a counterparty. The evolution of market prices over a series of forward dates is simulated, then the value of each derivative trade is calculated at that forward date using the simulated market prices. Read More

This is the second in a series of blogs on Vectorization, which is a key tool for dramatically improving the performance of code running on modern CPUs. Vectorization is the process of converting an algorithm from operating on a single value at a time to operating on a set of values at one time. Modern CPUs provide direct support for vector operations where a single instruction is applied to multiple data (SIMD). Read More

New challenges in the financial markets driven by changes in market structure and regulations and accounting rules like Basel III, EMIR, Dodd Frank, MiFID II, Solvency II, IFRS 13, IRFS 9, and FRTB have increased demand for higher performance risk and analytics. Problems like XVA require orders of magnitude more calculations for accurate results. This demand for higher performance has put a focus on how to get the most out of the latest generation of hardware. Read More

The financial services industry is unquestionably in the midst of a high-change, one that has the potential to radically  re-shape  the industry in the coming years.  The current changes feel disruptive because they are coming in a range of forms all at once. Read More

Quantifi and OTC Partners publish whitepaper titled ‘Identifying Liquidity Risk for Financial Stability’. This whitepaper explores the importance of liquidity in functioning of financial markets and the increasing regulatory pressures on capital market firms to ensure strong liquidity risk management practices are being carried out. read more

Selwood Asset Management, a newly authorised alternative investment manager, has confirmed the selection of Quantifi as its single Portfolio Management System (PMS). Selwood chose Quantifi ahead of other providers as they required a powerful, stable technology platform with rich functionality to deliver best practice portfolio management, valuations, trading, pre-trade and scenario analysis, and support for all of their risk management requirements.   read more

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the banking sector witnessed a plethora of regulatory changes. While these regulatory prescriptions cover every dimension of the banking world, the OTC derivatives (OTCDs) market has borne the brunt due to the derivatives' opaque and complex nature. Read More

The whitepaper explores how recent regulations are affecting the OTC derivative markets in complex and interrelated ways, which in turn have changed the way firms do business. Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets continue to be impacted by regulatory changes. These changes are increasing clearing costs and consequently trading costs, to an extent that could not have been anticipated by the market, given the complexity of these regulatory reforms. read more