Improving Risk Visibility and Enhancing Portfolio Management for Banks

We deliver the foundational components banks need to improve evaluation and visibility of risks and enhance portfolio management, integrating data, models, and processes to support new markets and safely enable digital transformation.

Empowering Banks to Integrate and Innovate at Scale

Changing risk scenarios, increasing competition, and volatile markets demand greater visibility and agility in how banks leverage technology and application development. Limited visibility of risk across all asset classes, internal silos, and legacy applications all contribute to an incomplete picture.

We help you overcome these obstacles, so your traders, risk professionals, and quant developers can have timely and accurate analytics as they focus on building differentiating strategies and honing a competitive edge.

Challenges

Inability to combine different asset classes into a complete picture and support new models and instruments, lack of consistency across business functions and units, and the need to have thorough risk assessments using multiple scenarios

Solution

A customizable cloud-based platform with cross-asset modeling and pricing capabilities, dynamic deal models, and a host of application development and integration tools tailor-made to help banks adapt and respond to changing markets within their risk parameters

Result

Spend much less time and effort on infrastructure and focus on generating better insights, comprehensive analyses, and reducing time to value

Our Banking Success Stories

Over the years, our solutions for application development, cloud migration, risk management, and more have helped banking clients overcome business and technology challenges and accelerate time to value. Here are some of the highlights.

Challenge

Multiple risk and pricing libraries, but lack of standardization across asset classes made it difficult and time consuming to get comprehensive risk analysis

Solution

Cloud-native platform with flexibility to integrate existing libraries and ingest required trade and market data

Integrated connectors to ingest data from different sources and eliminate silos
Source code license to ensure full transparency and improve consistency
Elastic compute pools for faster, more frequent, and granular risk analysis
Reporting framework to generate the desired internal and regulatory filings

Result

Enhanced visibility of overall and specific risks and parallel monitoring of legacy black box risk systems, requiring significantly fewer IT and quant resources

Challenge

No end-to-end infrastructure, lack of standardization across asset classes, and overlong timelines for adding or updating functionality

Solution

Cloud-based platform that can scale workloads, automate jobs, and support standard and proprietary analytics

Integrated market data, proprietary quant libraries and pricing models
Elastic cloud enables faster results and better insights
More frequent and granular risk analysis, instead of just EOD captures
More rapid development by moving from C++ to Python

Result

More time spent on tasks that add value. This bank can now do the same jobs using 10% of the IT and quant resources.

Challenge

Running XVA simulations at scale – 200,000 interest rate swaps with monthly steps for 30 years

Solution

Enhanced ability to evaluate projected performance of large trade portfolios over time, with simulated fixings and lifecycle events

1,000 simulated paths, 50 billion calculations, 400 GB of data
Adapted from MongoDB to S3 to handle large memory requirements
Cached results in memory for faster compute
Cloud-agnostic with ability to spin up additional processors as needed

Result

5 minutes to spin up 10,000 processors and 45 minutes to complete all calculations, at a total cost of $72

Challenge

Improve delivery of bespoke reports or benchmarks to clients on demand, including integration with OpenFin

Solution

Build custom applications with our application development framework in just a few weeks

Transaction cost analysis report populated with market, trade, and client data
Ability for agents or clients to download PDF reports of pre-built scenarios
Ability for clients to customize reports with Jupyter Notebook
Availability via web or OpenFin

Result

Built a new application in the same time as it used to take for one custom report. Clients now receive reports and benchmarks within the same day.

Challenge

Eliminate silos of spreadsheets and one-off solutions to improve client service and operational efficiency

Solution

Quant platform with integrated development environment to accelerate deployment of bespoke analytics

Plug-and-play integration of internal and external data sources
Incorporate in-house quant libraries and pricing models for operational consistency
Automate manual tasks with batch job scheduler
Create customized web applications for risk and reconciliation reporting

Result

Turnaround time for new functionality now measured in days, not weeks or months

Our Technology. Your Vision

Our platform is as powerful as it is versatile, helping banks take full advantage of powerful cloud infrastructure tools, advanced application development workflows, and more.

Cloud Infrastructure

Scalable and controlled cloud environments delivering performance, security, and cost savings

Developer Experience

Collaborative tools and workflows to increase software development efficiency and accelerate time to market

Applications

Prebuilt and extensible tools for analysis, trading, and risk management

Portfolio Management

Optimize your trades and holdings with comprehensive and customizable analytics across the enterprise

Risk Management

Aggregate, model, and manage risk across all asset classes from a single platform, using standard or proprietary pricing models and analytics

Sales & Trading

Integrate diverse datasets and analytics to evaluate performance across books, portfolios, and asset classes

Application Development

Build, test, configure, and deploy cloud-native applications at scale through our developer platform

Cloud Migration

Leverage cloud computing resources for faster results and better insights from your secure, automated, and cost-effective cloud domain

Hear from Our Clients

Let some of the markets’ most innovative banks tell you how Beacon improved their risk management, accelerated their entry to new markets, and optimized portfolio returns.

By utilizing Beacon’s comprehensive front to back functionality, we gain far greater scale while integrating Beacon with our existing systems right out of the gate

Jeff RobertsonHead of Retail Distribution, Enablement and Operations, TD Asset Management

With its cloud-native infrastructure and unique “buy and build on top” transparent source, Beacon allows us to enter new markets, streamline operational workflows, and leverage our proprietary pricing and analytics. Beacon empowers our developers and quants with the latest technologies and frees us to focus on the commercial aspects of our business.

Managing DirectorSMBC Capital Markets

With Beacon, the speed meets the need—we choose how fast we want results by spinning up more capacity.

Richard LamExecutive Director, Quantitative Solutions Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Beacon enables us to integrate engineers with the front office, removing extraneous layers and improving collaboration.

David DawsonExecutive Director, Co-Head Systematic Institutional Banking & Markets, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Go Deeper

News and perspectives on how fintech is changing risk analytics, alternative asset management, quant modeling, and more for the modern investment bank

October 31, 2022
Beacon Platform

I recently had the opportunity to chat with John Siracusa, host of the Bank On It podcast. John talks with fintech founders & investors who

October 19, 2021
Beacon Platform

NEW YORK, October 19th, 2021 — Beacon Platform is pleased to announce that Brean Capital, an independent investment bank headquartered in New York, has chosen