Pension firm

Dynamic data collection enables faster, better risk analysis

Challenges

The company’s central long-term investment management goal is to reach as high a real return as possible while securing solvency at all times. With this objective, the independent Risk Management and Controller Department continuously monitors investment performance and the total risk position and reports to management and the Board on a regular basis. Risk management is a heavy user of data from the asset management system, Wallstreet Suite.

Over time, many bespoke applications have been developed to perform the different analyses needed. But with risk management requirements continuously evolving, it had become increasingly difficult to manage the complex and processing-intensive calculations working in multiple spreadsheets. After some debate, the department decided to invest in MATLAB, the software for mathematical calculations, and installed it as its core application. MATLAB gave the risk team the calculations fire-power it needed, but presented a new challenge:

How to bring the data required into MATLAB efficiently? Workarounds were possible, but the ideal situation would be to run all analysis and reporting directly from MATLAB as the core application.

Solution

SkySparc came up with the solution using the interface builder in OmniFi. The interface builder can handle data from a wide variety of sources, dramatically cutting through the work required to build interfaces from scratch and enabling different internal and external systems to be efficiently integrated. Interfaces are built and tested working in Excel within OmniFi. Once development is complete the interface is deployed on the server in the production environment and Excel is no longer used.

A proof of concept showed how performance and key figure data could be extracted from the asset management system directly to the MATLAB desktop, in a format ready for analysis. Based on this, the team decided to use this solution to automate and integrate a range of key daily tasks. The interface builder is very easy to use, so the risk management team can create new interfaces themselves in OmniFi whenever they need, and then run them automatically, directly from MATLAB.

The OmniFi interface builder has become the fundamental enabler for us when working in our core MATLAB application.

Head Of Control at the company

Results

Risk management is now finding it straightforward to manage its analysis, management reporting and reconciliation requirements directly from its core application – running daily routines is now as easy as double clicking on the particular application in MATLAB.

The operational improvements are even more important to the team than the time savings achieved. When a workflow is automated, the operational risk through manual errors is greatly reduced and the process is also easily audited. When the team needs something new, they can now specify and build it themselves in just a couple of hours. For example, an application has been created in MATLAB to automatically reconcile prices from Wallstreet Suite against prices imported from Bloomberg. “The OmniFi interface builder has become the fundamental enabler for us when working in our core MATLAB application,” says the company’s Head of Control. He also values the problem-solving approach of SkySparc’s consultants, their technical ability and deep understanding of the firm's asset management system.