Largest Greek bank deploys risk technology

The National Bank of Greece (NBG), Greece’s largest financial institution, has decided to deploy Algorithmics’ Risk Watch application as an enterprise-wide risk management system in an effort to better manage credit and liquidity risks, and capital adequacy. Risk Watch will provide NBG with comprehensive methodologies to aggregate, simulate, manage and measure both credit and market risk.

By the time the final installations are in place – by the end of 2002 – analysts believe NBG should lay claim to the most comprehensive risk management system in Greece. The initial phase of the Risk Watch roll-out is scheduled to take place in early 2002, followed by the completion of phases two and three.

The bank, which has some 33,000 corporate clients, currently uses a proprietary system to support back-office treasury functions, and also an in-house developed value-at-risk model incorporated for trading, counterparty and liquidity risk. The group’s day-to-day asset liability and credit and operational risk management is handled by the bank’s treasury and internal audit departments respectively.