Many of our members are constantly asking questions related to the various software solutions available for trade and risk management such as Murex, Calypso, Kondor, Misys and so on.
I would like to open this discussion forum so that members who have experience with such packages could post their opinion or point others in the right direction regarding valuable resources on this theme.
The most important topics are
1. Comparison of various vendors offering trade management software, their specific weaknesses and strengths
2. Trends and perspectives in this industry segment
Replies
Are these real risk management software or just point estimate makers?
I'm using Crystal Ball from Oracle.
Boris, great topic. At the National Australia Bank Calypso, Misys and Murex are all used in various areas for various purposes. ON top of this they have built and purchased numerous other risk and pricing applications to support business objectives, such as Vector Risk, Credient, Experian, SAS and now moving towards Oracle solutions. Whats interesting is that the NAB, and I know many other financial organisations are similar as I have worked with a few, cannot seem to settle with whats off the shelf! Products are either not fit for purpose, dont meet requirements, or are close but need customisation, or we are in a market where there IS NO product and end up buidling our own (which is the space we play in - developing internal applications for risk based business problems and opportunities). External Vendors then play catch up with their offerring. I think the trend at least from the customers perspecitve, although only speaking for myself here, is towards more all encompassing solutions - web based, shared storage, automated workflows, parameterisable components, admin updates rather than technology involvement, and so on. IN this environment customers are seeking more bang for their buck with advanced and extensive business functionality, rather than an application which might excel at only one thing.............
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All, below is a quote from a user of StratexPoint, a SharePoint application for Strategy and Risk Management (www.stratexsystems.com). They are a partner company to my consultancy, Manigent.
I have experience with ThinkTank Collaboration Software. It is used by several "Big Four" for risk assessment engagements in their Enterprise Risk Management practice. The software is a web based, interactive application supporting effective team collaboration. It supports brainstorming, action planning and decision making quite effectively. The software automates the identify, categorize, prioritize and risk mitigation process. It allows anonymous contributions concurrently enabling the entire group to visualize the discussion for a candid discussion while saving significant time and generating more ideas. It has really cool analytic capabilities to allow the group to vote on each risk to determine the probability, impact or any other important criteria to allow the group to evaluate. The ideas are captured allowing a report to immediately be generated or session result to act as a workspace for future discussion, action planning and follow up.
This is a very interesting topic. In my case, my main experience is around Murex. It is a very powerful system although hard (and expensive) to maintain. In terms of product coverage Murex is one of the best trading platforms. It covers the most exotic OTC derivatives but it is not that good for cash products. With regards to Risk Management they are now investing heavily in the Historical Simulation VaR mainly due to the agreement with LCH to compute VaR for thousands of swaps almost in realtime. It lacks functionality for the buy side when having to measure in relative terms, against benchmarks. They are currently developing this module and will be ready soon to support traditional asset managers through the 3.1 version.