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

Analysis on risk and performance is available for fixed income, equities, foreign exchange (FX), commodities and derivatives, which are priced using third-party market data. All benchmarks, be they indices or liability streams, are available. Issuer spread curves are built daily, with histories. UBS recently added spread curves for fixed-income issuers and markets, calling them the next generation of fixed-income risk modeling. The curves are calibrated using all currencies of bonds and credit default swaps (CDSs) of an issuer, relative to market funding curves, to get a clearer view of how spreads trade. It has added a library of standard scenarios to supplement the user-defined scenarios tool within UBS Delta, allowing clients to create complex stress-tests more easily.

"The system is more than a tool─it is a scalable and flexible third-party risk engine," says Paul Murray, head of risk at UK-based asset manager Legal and General Investment. "We use it as a production system, with automated position uploads and report extracts. UBS Delta features a broad product set, comprehensive credit-curve hierarchy, and flexible reporting. We use it to generate an extensive range of risk analytics, sensitivities, scenarios, value at risk (VaR), tracking error, and liquidity-scoring information on a daily basis."

The solution also continues to focus on helping clients navigate the regulatory landscape. Insurance clients have benefitted from work on Solvency II asset analytics─for revealing potential capital requirements-and discount curves, allowing for modeling of potential liability changes as regulation evolves.

UBS Delta is seeing and supporting an increasing number of client requests for bespoke indices. In addition to this support, and its regulatory assistance, it will concentrate on aggregation across multiple entities and geographies and on its fixed-income modeling, with improved issuer-level and granular market curves.