Tamesis Releases Risk Informer For Consolidated View of Risk

In an effort to enable users to make more informed trading decisions, Tamesis has released its Risk Informer system to consolidate risk and profit and loss information in near real time. The Risk Informer product consolidates trader's cross-product positions and P&L where the trades originate, for improved market and credit risk transparency.

"Most trading desks are trading a wide variety of financial instruments and those trades tend to be put into different trade-capture systems," explains James Tomlin, CEO of Tamesis. "The problem is, if you want to get an up to date view of where you are and what your risks are, that's quite hard to do." He adds that most trading desks rely on spreadsheets, and have teams that work overnight in the middle office to get reports pulling new data from different systems and "patching it together and leaving it for traders overnight."

The Risk Informer consolidates information from the various trade-capture systems on an intra-day basis while allowing users to plug in their own analytics and models for risk calculations. "Risk Informer cooperates with the trade-capture systems to get the trades out and to get the basic trade data and put it together," says Tomlin. "Most of the systems have a relational database and we put a trigger on the database or something to get the trade data out and to keep the user notified of what the activity is."

Tomlin adds that the "near real time" aspect is important as many firms that rely on overnight processing are "operating in an environment that is giving them T+1 risk, or the risk as it was the night before, rather than something that's up to date." The Risk Informer sits on the trader's desktop and can be pulled up to get a customized risk view. "Users can configure the view as appropriate for them and see whatever level of aggregation they need--by currency or individual trader or whatever is relevant," says Tomlin.

The Risk Informer users can also define limits and alerts that are triggered by data changes. Factors causing value changes, such as a market-data movement, a rate reset or new deal can be traced by the user as well. The Risk Informer system uses Tamesis' component-based Java technology. For more information go to www.tamesis.com.