AFTAs 2017: Most Innovative Third-Party Technology Vendor—Risk, Compliance and Reporting—Imagine Software

In the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers failure back in September 2008 and the subsequent global financial crisis, demand for enhanced risk and portfolio management systems skyrocketed, forming the genesis of Imagine Software’s approach to its technology development efforts. The RRC solution was commissioned by the vendor’s clients, with some requiring a solution to manage global compliance, while others found their existing technologies were inadequate to handle large-scale trading operations alongside evolving regulatory requirements. Imagine Software undertook a significant reworking of its underlying architecture to develop a sustainable risk and regulatory reporting solution designed to investigate, identify, correct and report risk exposures on a trade-by-trade, tick-by-tick basis.

RRC is a real-time risk engine combined with a managed data service covering all asset classes and integrating with legacy systems. It effectively sits on top of an organization’s existing technology infrastructure and delivers streaming real-time trade summaries, alerts and operational data, key metrics such as net-asset values (NAVs) and value-at-risk (VaR), and full access to positions, pricing inputs and analytics. The solution’s analytics framework provides a flexible toolset to monitor risk and exposure, covering a range of metrics and historical scenarios, as well as stress-testing functionality and data visualization tools.

Imagine Software’s efforts are clearly bearing fruit—it has attracted new clients across the buy side and sell side, the most notable of which is Societe Generale. The French bank deployed the RRC solution to manage risk operations across thousands of trades per second across millions of positions for its Prime Services group, using the platform to track regulatory limits and investment risk, to identify potential intra-day breaches of capital utilization limits, and perform institutional-grade due diligence across all asset classes.