Financial services firms are under increasing pressure to grow revenue and market share amidst intense competition, regulations and the growing need for enterprise risk management. HPC management software allows you to compete as a more agile firm, making better, more profitable decisions.  

First to the opportunity makes the most profit

• Profitable business is the realm of those who are quick to identify opportunities and act
• Competitive financial institutions are creating more intricate products with complex mathematical models – derivatives pricing & hedging, credit & market risk, and actuarial analysis
• Massive market data volumes and rapidly changing conditions increase computational complexities
• Global markets never shut down, requiring a world-wide, always-on infrastructure
• IT decisions are scrutinized for added business value, potential ROI, and the Total Cost of Ownership

The Platform Solution

Platform’s solution for the Financial Services sector is built around the Platform Accelerate and Platform Manage Suite of HPC Management Software Products. The cornerstone product for Financial Services institutions – Platform Symphony – the lowest latency HPC software available, enables IT managers to provide a complete utility computing foundation to meet line of business objectives. 

• Manage and reduce risk exposure by performing risk calculations and responding to global volatility in real-time, with greater accuracy than before
• Do more with less by improving performance and response times of service-oriented, compute and data intensive, applications distributed
• Reduce TCO, save millions of dollars, by increasing utilization of expensive CPUs, reducing energy for powering and cooling, and eliminating costly duplications of siloed resources
• Enable a utility service model by sharing computational power across applications and lines of business

Solutions for Capital Markets

The bar is always rising for capital market firms:

• Market and credit risk simulations are now required hourly or even pre-deal
• Increasing strains on line-of-business compute resources cause slower, riskier application performance, and internal fights for resources
• Products once considered exotic are now standard
• Old assumptions are being relaxed, making simple closed-form solutions obsolete

Whether pricing foreign exchange options, calculating enterprise risk measures or feeding real-time information to hundreds or thousands of screens, Platform’s HPC solutions increase application performance, system utilization and business continuity.

• React with greater agility to shifts in the market. Use compute power when needed, as needed to price and hedge derivative securities, more quickly and more accurately
• Lower the total cost of computing across the organization. Balance supply and demand of computing resources with a single, transparent, aggregated source of computing power
• Manage resources more effectively. Guarantee adequate resources for front, middle, and back office applications – quickly, efficiently and in the right priority

Solutions for the Insurance Industry

Challenges that face insurance companies include:

• Remaining competitive while meeting complex and changing regulatory mandates
• High degree of complexity of performing risk calculations across millions of policies, and thousands of scenarios
• Making riskier decisions due to slower application performance hurts competitiveness

To remain competitive while meeting regulatory mandates your insurance firm is likely using stochastic approaches to price and assess the reserves and capital for many of your more complex liabilities. Whether running end-of-month actuarial calculations, testing multiple scenarios or calculating Deliverable Acquisition Costs balances, Platform’s grid solutions will distribute calculations across a virtualized pool of managed resources to accelerate calculations from days to minutes and help:

• Improve service levels. Deliver compute resources when needed, as needed, across all of areas of your business, including claims processing and data center automation

• Reduce costs. Improve pricing of new products and reduce the risk capital required to support them with increased calculation accuracy and frequency

Solutions for Retail Banking

The Retail Banking sector faces unique challenges of its own:

To increase revenue and profitability, retail banks need to efficiently match the right products with the right client in a timely and accurate fashion. Ever-increasing strains on your organization’s siloed and heterogeneous compute resources, lead to slow responses to market stimuli. Platform Symphony eases these strains by allowing you to:

• Boost revenues and profit while reducing risk. Accelerate the speed and accuracy of predictive modeling tools. Supercharge your analytics and data-mining applications for improved target marketing, cross-selling and credit application processes
• Guarantee critical uptime and deliver continuity on a lights-out basis. Superior application resiliency, redundancy and peak provisioning, are standard with Platform’s HPC solutions. Robust, self-healing architectures ensure business continuity and full information integrity at all times