Risk Newsflashes

Wachovia subscribes to Fitch Risk's FIRST database; Bear Stearns Asset Management Buys Measurisk with minority partner; SEC Merchant Banking chooses Summit System.

Wachovia entered into subscription agreement with Fitch Risk to access OpVantage's Financial Institutions Risk Scenario Trend (FIRST) database of operational-risk case studies and its quantitative OpVar database for modeling purposes.

The bank will use the FIRST database as content for its firm-wide risk awareness and self-assessment programs. The database contains case studies on nearly 4,500 operational risk-loss events. Wachovia's operational risk-team will also be using OpVantage's quantitative database of almost 10,000 external loss events and data points in the development of an operational risk-capital model.

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Bear Stearns Asset Management, together with its minority partner Miller Tabak+Co., have acquired Measurisk and renamed the firm Bear Measurisk. The company provides institutional investors and asset managers with sophisticated risk-transparency and risk-measurement solutions, across multi-asset class, global portfolios. Bear Measurisk's independent, third-party-risk-solutions are designed to address the needs of pension plans, endowments and foundations, insurance companies, hedge funds and funds of hedge funds.

In the release, Greg Quental, president and chief executive officer of Bear Measurisk, states, "Our clients will benefit greatly from our ability to be able to leverage the resources and analytics capability of Bear Stearns," but he adds, "Bear Measurisk will operate in separate facilities and use separate systems to protect client confidentiality."

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SEB Merchant Banking, a division of SEB Group, selected Summit Systems' treasury and capital-markets solution to help consolidate risk monitoring for several desks into one platform. The deal means that Summit's system will expand from focusing on derivatives at the Nordic bank to provide coverage across different asset classes, processing a wide range of trades from foreign exchange to futures, forward-rate agreements and swaps.

The solution will include Summit's real-time-analytics framework providing immediate information updates on the position and exposures of any trade. SEB will utilize Summit's real-time market-risk analysis to identify and capture market and arbitrage opportunities quickly for the most efficient and cheapest hedging strategies. Additional analytics provided by Summit include real-time profit-and-loss decomposition and gap analysis.