Benros Capital Adopts Cloud App for Portfolio, Risk

Benros Capital of London recently implemented a cloud-based portfolio and risk management tool from Imagine Software last June.

Benros is a new European event-driven fund founded by former Goldman Sachs proprietary traders Daniele Benatoff and Ariel Roskis. They will use the Imagine system to provide real-time portfolio and risk management of its global equity, derivative, and FX operations.

"Imagine stood apart from the other providers we evaluated because it alone offered institutional-grade functionality within an affordable and scalable cost structure," says Ariel Roskis, chief investment officer of Benros, in a press release.

Roskis continues: "We needed intra-day, firm-wide risk and P&L oversight, as well as extensive reporting capabilities. Imagine's live portfolio management and risk exposure monitoring tools empowered us to track P&L, manage our positions and exposure, run stress tests, determine VaR and perform a host of other essential calculations with fast, anytime, anywhere access. Additionally, the efforts of their professional services staff to ensure the system met our specific needs -- particularly their work in creating certain automated mechanisms to improve our operational efficiency -- were a great part of the reason why we went with Imagine."

Imagine claims to have more than 150 clients in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. "They range from small operations of three people and to larger ops with 100 people. The one thing they have in commons is they don't want a lot of hardware to maintain (these systems). They find the cloud offering attractive because it's turn-key. It's real-time risk and PnL side by side," Dr. Lance Smith, CEO of Imagine, tells Advanced Trading.

Pointing to the advantages of the cloud-based application, Imagine says that the fund's implementation was rapidly configured to suit the needs of the firm's portfolio managers, who were up and running on the system in a short period of time without the need for any local hardware or software installations. The cloud app is integrated with Benros' order/execution systems, prime broker linkages, and fund administrator.

Phil Albinus is the former editor-in-chief of Advanced Trading. He has nearly two decades of journalism experience and has been covering financial technology and regulation for nine years. Before joining Advanced Trading, he served as editor of Waters, a monthly trade journal ... View Full Bio