risk management, and the solution renamed TopOffice and positioned to complement KGR. Whereas Kondor+ and K+TP constituted a classic front-to-back office trading floor suite for FX, MM, rates and such like, said Thomson Reuters’ global head of product and development, Boris Lipiainen, at the time, KGR and TopOffice were meant to be enterprise- wide. When Reuters looked into JRisk, it was impressed with ‘the ability to compute and manage cross-asset risk’, he said. It supported the rapid addition of new instruments and asset classes, providing the risk management and ability to price using internal and external options. It took some time to adapt the engine to constitute a package, he said; it was then a case of identifying business problems to apply it to.


By mid-2008, JRisk was positioned as an intraday risk layer for top-tier banks, to sit directly behind disparate front offices, taking in, stress-testing and aggregating risk data. It could also be extended into the front office itself, where there was a need to add new instruments. In many ways, it mirrored KGR: JRisk was for intraday behind the trading systems; KGR was for risk consolidation across siloes on an end-of-day basis, sitting behind the back office systems. Both were positioned as horizontal layers to cut across siloes. The addition of JRisk functionality apparently helped the


retention of customers for Kondor+. Korea Exchange Bank had informed Reuters that it intended to replace its platform and had looked at Murex’s MxG 2000 and Misys’ Summit, the supplier claimed. The bank went a fair way with the evaluation, it was said, but Reuters was then able to come back with the product roadmap for Kondor+ after the acquisition of JRisk. Based on the incorporation of JRisk functionality into Kondor+ and the future investment and direction, Korea Exchange Bank decided to upgrade to Kondor+ Version 3.0 for front office and signed to take additional modules for derivatives trading, structured products and risk management. The JRisk-derived TopOffice was described as a modular, enterprise-wide risk management framework for real-time aggregation and management of risk exposures and P&L across business operations. Intended to enable heads of risk management, trading and investments to measure, analyse, and model risk exposures, and calculate and explain profits and losses in a single integrated platform, it also delivered reporting flexibility which was intended to allow decision makers to explore details and understand the drivers of risk and profits. A data integration engine was meant to allow it


to connect quickly and economically to existing data sources, including front offices, legacy systems, models, feeds, and risk engines.


By 2009, TopOffice was in use in around 20 banks outside of the UK, with high hopes for further recruits within the latter region. Indeed, around this time, it was announced that Thomson Reuters was enhancing the solution to help UK-based FIs meet the FSA’s proposed liquidity reporting requirements. These regulations, which were to come into effect later in the year, required every UK FI to report liquidity levels on a daily basis to help build a picture of the industry’s health. Banks would also need to be able to perform stress tests to identify any funding gaps. The TopOffice Liquidity Management module would enable banks to draw together the relevant data and present it in the correct format. As well as being sold with Kondor+, TopOffice was meant as a standalone offering. It was being piloted at the end of 2009 by the ‘global arbitrage business of a major firm’ in New York that was not a Kondor+ user. The company had an internal project with one of Thomson Reuters’ competitors but this was abandoned, said Lipiainen. RBC Capital Markets was also a recruit for TopOffice in the second half of 2010.


It is worth noting that, a bit like Misys had the old Risk


Vision offering and made a couple of niche acquisitions, it was much the same at Reuters. It had its own long-standing enterprise limits system, which ended up as Kondor Global Limits (formerly KreditNet). There was also Kondor Value at Risk (KVAR+), which started as Sailfish, stemming from New York-based Sailfish Systems, which was acquired for $2 million in September 1995. Something called the Reuters Unified Application Framework came to provide a single, browser- based front-end to the risk systems and Kondor+. The latter had also historically been used at some institutions for risk management, including at Fimat (which became Newedge), The New South Wales Treasury Corporation (TCorp) and MKB Hungary. Back office solution, K+TP, also has some risk management functionality.


Risk Management Systems & Suppliers Report | www.ibsintelligence.com


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