GNI to replace Algo RiskWatch with SunGard Panorama

GNI Fund Management (GNI FM), a London-based fund of hedge funds with about $550 million of assets under management, started its implementation of SunGard Trading and Risk Systems’ Panorama platform early this month. The system is scheduled to go live at the beginning of May and Matt Hollier, GNI FM’s development director, expects the firm to be "capturing the full benefits" within the next six months.

Panorama, a real-time, modular trading and risk management platform, is designed to support straight-through processing, portfolio analysis and risk management. Colin Blackett, GNI FM’s IT manager, said the system will replace Algorithmics’ RiskWatch application, which GNI FM has been using to manage its risk.

Gloria Pilz, GNI FM’s head of risk management, said Panorama could provide additional ways of looking at risk other than the standard value-at-risk, concentration and stress-testing measures. "Some of these procedures are quite standard," she said, "but for us what’s important is the flexibility and the ways we can work with the data inside the system. We’ll start with end-of-day position reporting, but we’ll move that to intra-day and real-time reporting as we progress."

Pilz said the risk measures GNI FM will be looking to run in the first phase of development would be quite standard. "The bells and whistles will come after that," she said. "Because we look at hedge funds with a number of trading strategies, we will be designing different risk reports for each specific strategy – the standard value-at-risk calculations are not going to capture a lot of risk in hedge funds."

Hollier said the decision to appoint SunGard as the firm’s new risk management technology partner was driven by price, scalability and ease of deployment. "The package was competitively priced given the fact that we’re a lot smaller than most of the companies SunGard ordinarily deals with, and its ease of implementation was crucial because we don’t have hundreds of people to throw at it."

Pilz added: "It was more of a PC-based system than other products. It’s also quite modular, so we can add more users easily when we need to."

The firm licensed six users initially with the option of extending the service to others, although GNI FM is, by its own admission, a small, niche player with a total headcount of only 25.