WORK


bers


Edinburgh-based Noble Group. Underpinned by this cutting-edge


technology, the MAYA Fund was launched in 2010, with seed funding of £10m from a leading UK investment management group, and has been fully invested since January 2011. It has since been ranked in the top 10 long/short equity funds by several major hedge fund databases, delivering good performance and low volatility.


A number of other


prominent investment funds have since entered strategic partnerships with Level E, giving them access to its unique


proprietary systems. These include, among other functionality, trade


order management, reporting


and compliance management, portfolio stress testing and back testing, and live portfolio performance analysis. “Since the launch of The MAYA


Fund, a number of interested parties have asked us to expand our capabilities beyond the core MAYA predictive technology to offer a broader spectrum of investment technology services,” confirms Schulenburg. “Applying artificial intelligence


advances to the investment world has been a long journey and a major challenge, but we feel we are on the right path. With very little or no marketing effort, we have serviced companies across many cities, including New York, Luxembourg, Edinburgh, London and Sao Paolo. Clients find us, which is extremely reassuring.”


BARRIE & HIBBERT


Barrie & Hibbert is a specialist market risk analyst, which uses a range of innovative and powerful modelling techniques to help clients understand how today’s uncertain financial markets can impact their business.


By using Barrie & Hibbert’s


‘stochastic’ asset modelling framework – ‘stochastic’ refers to the calculation of probability in a system with a strong random element – clients can model economic and asset scenarios, improving their understanding of risk and informing their decisions. The company has won a number


of awards for its groundbreaking approach, including Life & Pensions Risk


Generator (ESG), developed over


15 years with more than 300 man-years in


research and development. But Andrew Boddie, head


of marketing with Barrie & Hibbert, explains that the complexity of the models, not to mention the very high value of the businesses in question, means development and improvement of the ESG will always be an ongoing process.


“Whether the organisation


is an insurance company valuing a complex liability, a pension fund seeking to understand and manage its funding level, or a financial planner giving retirement advice, they require the right tools and content to achieve a high


Whether an insurance company or a pension fund, they require the right tools to achieve a high degree of confidence in valuations


ANDREW BODDIE, HEAD OF MARKETING, BARRIE & HIBBERT


Magazine’s No 1 provider of economic scenario generation for the past two years, and 2011’s best risk management agent in the eFinancial News Awards for Excellence in Investor Service Europe. Globally, more than $25 trillion of insurance and pension assets and liabilities are managed with the support of its products and services, while over 60 per cent of global insurers on the Global Fortune 500 use Barrie & Hibbert models. Many of the global actuarial and accounting consultancies also use its models as part of their service offering. At the core of Barrie & Hibbert’s


framework sits its Economic Scenario


degree of confidence in the accuracy of your valuations,” he says. Barrie & Hibbert has one of the largest teams in the world working on the commercial development and delivery of stochastic models and calibrations. The team includes


financial experts and


Andy Frepp, Barrie & Hibb CEO


academics, economists, mathematicians and actuaries,


all working together to bridge the gap between financial market theory and practice. As well as those who build,


develop, deliver and support its models, the company employs experienced market practitioners who know how to align solutions to a specific client’s needs.


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