£60 billion Isis fund signs up to Riskdata

Isis, a £60 billion UK investment fund created through the merger of Friends Ivory & Sime and Royal & SunAlliance Investments at the end of last year, has signed up to use an interactive risk management system developed by Paris-based company Riskdata.

Isis is Riskdata’s first client outside France. Isis head of risk management Richard Boardman described the product as a “powerful risk management tool” that was particularly attuned to assessing short-term capital market volatility.

Riskdata’s online service refreshes thousands of possible outcomes for each individual asset by combining Monte Carlo simulation techniques and stress testing. It covers equities and bonds, as well as regulated and over-the-counter derivatives. Riskdata then tells fund managers where they are exposing assets to risk and how much of that capital is genuinely at risk. It also enables managers to quantify the risks in portfolios, using value-at-risk and active risks against a given benchmark, to help them build portfolios based on their risk and return expectations.

BNP Paribas Alternative Investments and Société Générale Asset Management both use Riskdata products, along with a number of other French asset managers.

The company has not used an application service provider approach, which means client information is not transferred from their firewall environment.

Riskdata is supported by Robert Mundell, a Nobel prize winner for economics in 1999, along with a number of ex-bankers, scientists and IT experts. It now has offices in Paris, London and New York.