IBM Platform Computing

Financial Markets & Insurance

Facing increasingly restrictive economic pressures and growing regulatory demands, financial services companies are looking for: better insights for trading, risk management, and customer care; ways to improve IT performance to meet these demands and reduce operating costs at the same time; greater operational agility to respond faster to market changes. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help.

The Challenge

Deeper and faster analytics is the name of the game for firms in the financial marketplace. Such analytics place an enormous strain on computing resources due to the volume, velocity, and complexity of calculations and data.

Financial Markets and Insurance

Regulations like Basel III and RMORSA are pushing companies of all types and sizes to calculate their exposures in near real time, specifically within the areas of credit risk and solvency. Credit risk calculations can be 100 to 25,000 times more computationally intensive than market risk calculations.

Banking

Retail banks are looking to gain better understanding of their clients’ needs and get ahead of the competition in product development and service offers. As clients’ preferred mode of transactions and communications shift to Social Media, banks are now challenged to capture, maintain, and analyze data from these multi-channels. Data with the volume, variety, velocity and now veracity are known as Big Data.

The Solution

IBM Platform Computing solutions can help you improve the performance of your analytics to support faster, more accurate and more reliable decision-making in financial markets. Private HPC clusters, grids and clouds allow multiple applications and lines of business to effectively utilize a common heterogeneous, shared infrastructure to support both compute and Big Data analytics. Compute intensive analytics include: pricing of market and credit risk, compliance reporting, pre-trade analysis, back testing and new product development.

IBM Platform Symphony is a powerful, enterprise-class grid management solution for organizations running compute- and data-intensive applications. Symphony accelerates a wide variety of parallel applications, quickly computing results while making optimal use of available infrastructure. It provides the agility required to predictably meet and exceed throughput goals for the most demanding risk management applications.

The IBM Platform Computing clusters, grid, and HPC cloud management software solutions help distribute and accelerate workload processing and guarantee the completion of workloads across a distributed, shared IT environment, while fully utilizing all HPC resources—regardless of operating system or architecture. The result is improved application performance for a significantly reduced total cost of ownership.

The Benefits

You need to get the most out of your IT investment: infrastructure capacity, utilization and performance. IBM Platform Computing solutions can help you perform more rigorous analysis with more data to properly simulate market and credit risk, and meet regulatory requirements. Platform Computing solutions support:

• Focused technical and distributed computing management software helps you create, integrate and manage shared computing environments that are used in compute- and data-intensive applications.
• A unified systems management environment automatically optimizes IT resources and speeds application system deployment, delivering IT services efficiently while reducing management and administration costs.

Success Stories

• 

  Major Wallstreet Firm

  Drive down the capital and operational costs for a distributed computational grid.

• 

  Major Insurance Company (PDF, 1.3MB)

  Run up to 10x more scenario models at once and reduced time to run complex stochastic simulations.

Learn More

• Take the TCO Challenge

Solution Briefs

• Financial Markets & Insurance Brief (688KB)
• IBM Platform Computing & Big Insights (594KB)
• The State of Next-Generation Market and Credit-Risk Analytics: Making Progress in Risk Management

Whitepapers

• Building A Dynamic Risk Infrastructure With Algorithmics
• Developers Guide To Accelerating Microsoft Excel Models
• Impact Of Regulations On Risk and Trading Analytics In Capital Markets

Webcasts

• Tame Big Data with Clustered File Systems
• Agile IT for Dynamic Financial Markets
• Managing Risk Analysis (00:03:20)