Increased volatility, the growth of new asset classes, increased exposure to illiquid assets, and stricter and broader financial regulations are pushing investment firms to seek better and more efficient ways to meet today’s risk dynamics. Managing risk parameters, preparing “what-if” scenarios and analysis across systems, or creating new risk reports, are just a few ways we can help you improve your risk playbook.

Solving risk challenges across asset classes

At Beacon, our diverse customers are using Beacon Platform for a wide range of risk challenges. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), a multinational bank with businesses across the globe, was struggling with a lack of standardization across product types and asset classes, causing delays in results and making it difficult for CBA to scale up and meet client needs. With Beacon they built an independent and cross-asset implementation of pricing models and risk engines to validate calculations from other systems, enabling their business to grow faster and capture new business. 

Another example comes from a cryptocurrency lender whose legacy in-house systems could not be extended to accommodate this new asset class, and whose decentralized risk management made reporting and reconciliation very time consuming. With Beacon they were able to centralize trade and position management and modeling of crypto currencies, derivatives, and related loans. This customer now consolidates risk reporting and daily mark-to-market for all counterparties as part of its robust risk management process.

These are just two examples of different customers with unique challenges, and how Beacon gave them a better understanding of their portfolio risks and met their risk management needs.  

How Beacon enables change

To tackle these risk challenges, Beacon consolidated trading information, portfolio positions, data science tools, and risk analytics onto a modern cloud platform. Beacon also provides an open and customizable financial object hierarchy that enables customers to quickly and easily add new instruments and pricing models that immediately slot into existing applications, analytics, and reports. We understand every customer has different risk needs and we meet them by offering the following: 

• Multi-asset pricing and risk libraries that run on a common infrastructure in a single platform.
• A fully managed elastic cloud infrastructure, enabling custom scenarios and risk measures to be added with minimal effort and impact.
• Core trading system interfaces designed to be extensible, allowing quants to rapidly add new models and risk reports.
• Risk analytics and reports that use the same trading datasets as sales and trading. 
• Strong protection and security for each customer’s intellectual property, with a customer-centric ethos.
• Tools to build a cloud-enabled FRTB infrastructure, unlocking capital and regulatory compliance.

The Beacon Advantage

Using our capabilities and your internal systems, navigating risk challenges together quickly brings results. But there’s more that we uniquely offer to meet customer risk needs. The ability to run risk on demand in the cloud through a native capability can integrate internal pricing models across a customer’s entire trading book. Utilizing a centralized risk management system allows for vanillas and exotics to be combined across asset classes, supported by our deep library of financial derivatives.

“Without Beacon, I don’t think that we could get where we are as quickly as we have,” said Richard Lam, Executive Director, Quantitative Solutions Group, CBA. 

Calculating end-of-day risk reports on large books, selecting the speed of results, and actively working towards more frequent and granular intraday analyses are just some of the ways that we help risk professionals create and use risk management systems. 

Contact us for a consultation to review your needs and discuss potential adjustments for an enhanced and adaptable risk playbook.