Risk Technology Awards 2019: The Technancial Company

Risk dashboard software of the year

Mirko Marcadella, The Technancial Company

JANUS Risk Manager is a multi-asset, multicurrency and multi-market real-time risk management and order validation system for exchange-traded financial instruments. Key to its success is its flexible and highly scalable dashboard for real-time data monitoring, updates and rule checks. The modern JANUS user interface allows users to easily configure their dashboards and prioritise content without the need for IT support or programming skills.

JANUS can take in thousands of client account limits, as well as market data and trades. The margin engine evaluates portfolio margins and profit and loss continuously, checking available spending power, as well as monitoring trading abuse and tracking a multitude of key indicators of trading system performance. The dashboard dynamically sorts or prioritises accounts in alert status by various criteria, enabling risk managers to see developing risks. Criteria can be regulatory, user-defined or based on client account characteristics. 

For example, positions that did not appear risky in the previous end-of-day stress test assessment would be highlighted if they began to display rapidly growing short gamma or shrinking margin excess, or there was a concentration of positions in a certain market. Risk managers will see the previously hidden risks as top-line items coupled with alerts that have been sent because of breaches at levels below cut-off values.

Alerts can be directly queried with single-click actions to drill down to the alert detail, and then to the components that caused the alert. Components can include margin compared with collateral increase, positions in a particular instrument exceeding a specified percentage of the exchange average daily volume, or margin concentration. Another click will show detail on exposure at multiple clearing houses. Additionally, a major alert that could put an account into the critical zone can have an automated kill switch.

In 2018, the firm introduced JANUS Behavioural Analytics, a module that records all data related to checks in a holistic manner. This can include initial margin, variation margin, collateral and market data. The module will link a breach to the complete history leading up to it – the events, checks and activity – and display it in a single selectable chart view. This enables users to discover all actions leading to a breach, near-breach values, their frequency, actions that moved values towards breach conditions and, finally, the breach itself. 

Mirko Marcadella, managing director and co‑founder of The Technancial Company, says: “Designing JANUS as a gatekeeper, we didn’t predict its use would go beyond this as much as it has, with clients adding to the rich feature set, making it more than just a safety tool. Users saw how much could be learned from risk rule alerts, and we realised there was a lot more information in data captured even before an alert happened. JANUS Dashboard provides modern means of access to JANUS Risk Manager real-time measurements and alerts, as well as JANUS Behavioural Analytics historical data and analytics. It represents a new disruptive paradigm in limit setting and monitoring, and we are delighted to have earned this recognition for our team’s hard work.” 

Judges comments

“Technancial’s product is adaptable to a wide range of organisations.” 

“A solid offering that is commercially successful and adapted to current needs of trading and broking surveillance, compliance, clearing and risk management.”

“An innovative solution, with the ability for users to customise it a big plus. It targets a wide variety of organisations and users, including risk managers in the front office, as well as operational risk managers.”

 

Read more articles from the 2019 Risk Technology Awards 

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