Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Broker-Supplied Tool/Technology—UBS Delta

In recent years, buy-side firms have come to lean on their broker partners in order to address changes in regulation. From the review of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II) to Dodd–Frank,there are an ever-increasing number of rules that require firms to manage their risk and performance in a more efficient way.

UBS has answered this call with its UBS Delta cross-asset portfolio risk and performance system. It is a hosted solution that provides a web-based interface for running analyses with user-defined parameters. Over the last 18 months, UBS has increased its asset coverage to support fixed-income securities, rate swaps and options, credit derivatives, foreign exchange (FX) spot, forward and options, commodities, inflation-linked assets, cash-flow liabilities, and a range of equities. To address the changing regulatory environment, it has added new analytics for Solvency II, liquidity risk, and counterparty risk reports. It has also added new grid technology for running large reports in parallel, and a revaluation scenario-analysis tool, which provides “greater flexibility in defining shocks by risk factor and applying different shocks to assets with different characteristics,” according to Lindsey Matthews, managing director and UBS Delta head of client education and marketing.

Part of what makes UBS Delta special is its issuer-spread curves, which are built daily. They include histories, and the system supports any benchmark—index, liability stream, or portfolio—available for relative analysis. The platform is also a leader in the insurance/pension actuarial liabilities space.

UBS Delta has a daunting three-week release cycle, although in the coming months, UBS plans to unveil a new flexible portfolio analysis tool, which will allow clients to set up their own analytics, based on user-defined values and analytics that can differ based on characteristics of instruments; a new integrated issuer-curve model and structure; and new web-based counterparty analytics, according to Matthews. —AM