Grid Architecture for Risk Management: A Case Study in a Financial Institution

Modern financial market places are the most competitive and most dynamic ones in all of the history wherefore especially market risk management is a vital task in the financial services industry. Since market risk management is a compute and resource-intensive process, Grid applications seem to be a promising solution to meet the tremendous calculation demand in the financial services industry while preventing investment and maintenance costs for additional compute resources. In our case study we researched a newly implemented Grid solution in a large German bank installed to evaluate market price and portfolio risks in a fast and accurate way. The new Grid-based solution allowed the bank to reduce risk calculation update cycles from twice a day to every 7 minutes while time-to-market for new products could be reduced to one fourth of the original time. In this paper, based on a real example we investigate how banks can successfully implement Grid solutions in a fast and effective way and explore the based on economic impacts.