Pricing and analytics: Structured products/cross-asset and Market risk management product of the year – Beacon

Mark Higgins, Beacon

Beacon’s pricing and analytics platform includes a suite of front‑office tools and enables users to unify pre‑trade analytics, real‑time pricing, booking and post‑trade risk management. 

For sell‑side users, Quote Tool facilitates efficient sales and trading workflows by allowing salespeople to quickly structure and price trades accurately, iterate with their clients to find the optimal trade or hedge, and to be responsive to client needs. This is particularly important for global sales and trading businesses, where sales personnel might be in a different region or time zone from the trading desk. 

Structuring Tool is geared toward sales, strategists and structurers, and complements Quote Tool by offering functionality for more complex trades, including the ability to customise fields, add fees and create complex transaction packages using a portfolio wrapper. Structuring Tool offers the capability to explore what‑if trades, save multiple potential structures and run risk analytics on a set of pre‑trades. 

A financial object model enables in-house developers to create new instruments and add them to Quote Tool and Structuring Tool for seamless integration with Beacon’s booking and reporting workflows. 

Through Beacon’s high-performance grid scheduler and cloud service, users can distribute complex calculations to any number of ‘elastic compute’ units without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. 

Beacon provides clients access to its full set of source code, as well as the same set of enterprise technology tools its developers use to create the platform’s financial logic and applications. 

These tools include an integrated development environment with controls, a job scheduler for batch jobs, a grid scheduler for parallel and elastic computation, and Beacon’s Glint web application development framework. Over the past 12 months, Beacon has incorporated the open-source Plotly and Apache Superset visualisation tools into its platform for business intelligence and other analytics. 

 

Judges said: 

“Extensive tools for structured products in a DIY platform.”

“Beacon has made a  number of interesting enhancements to its platform over the past year, including a new user interface and a stress tool, as well as adding cross-asset valuation and support for Plotly and Apache Superset data visualisation and dashboards.”

“Beacon’s philosophy is to empower the client so they can optimise the technology for themselves.”

 

Mark Higgins, chief operating officer and co‑founder, Beacon Platform, says:

“Beacon offers a unique combination: cutting-edge, cross-asset trading and risk management solutions that leverage decades of experience at some of the biggest financial institutions in the world, plus an integrated full-stack developer platform that lets your developers and quants extend functionality and build your own. Beacon lets your institution move quickly to take advantage of pay-as-you-go elastic cloud compute, closely integrate your developers with the business while being controlled and secure, and react at the pace of the market to changing opportunities.”

 

Read more articles from the Risk Markets Technology Awards 2019 winners’ review

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