RBS selects Algo credit to manage global wholesale credit limits

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has selected Algo Credit to manage its global limits and exposures management from Algorithmics, the Toronto-based provider of risk management software.

RBS will use Algo Credit to oversee financial credit risk for all its commercial and treasury portfolios. Algo Credit's limits and exposure functionality provides an integrated framework for managing credit risk across the enterprise, covering real-time global limits and counterparty exposure management for both trading and banking book products.

RBS chose Algorithmics following a review of other vendors and cited Credit's scalability, component-based architecture, and coverage of both banking book and trading book as important in its decision to opt for the Canadian-built software.

Laurie Mayers, group head of Basel II and credit systems co-ordination at RBS, said Credit would provide a single, fully integrated view of the bank's counterparty exposures across all products and business lines. “Longer term, Algo Credit will also serve as a core data storage and aggregation platform for our BIS II risk architecture at the group and core wholesale bank level," he added.

Algo Credit will replace some internal limit and exposure management systems at both group and divisional level, and will in other cases be integrated with existing operating systems to achieve a global view of RBS' credit risk. Installation for RBS' core corporate bank and financial markets businesses will be complete by the end of this year.

Other users of Algo Credit include Italian bank Capitalia and Mexican regional bank Banorte.