Thanks to Nick Leeson at Barings Bank Plc and certain copper trading irregularities by Mr Hamanaka at Sumitomo Corp, the timing of the launch of Midas Kapiti International’s Global Risk Management System should be spot on. Regulators are now pushing banks to tighten up their risk management systems, or face having to put up more capital to underwrite risk if their systems are found to be wanting. Misys Plc’s international banking software systems arm, formed from the merger of BIS International, Kapiti Ltd and Misys’ ACT Group Plc acquisition (CI No 2,715), has launched Global Manager, a data consolidation engine, and Risk Vision, a global risk management application. The company has worked with four international banks, including Finland’s state-owned Postipankki and the Luxembourg subsidiary of German Bayerische Landesbank, to develop the risk systems Global Manager enables banks to exploit legacy and other systems by consolidating data from a wide variety of front and back-office systems into a common data format. It consists of a Global Data Model, Data Manipulation and Data Transport component. The global data model provides a centralized database containing all transaction and cash flow data needed to support risk management and other management information systems. Data manipulation enables the processing of this data and storage in a common form regardless of where the data originated. It also controls management of the data. Data transport handles the importing of the data from disparate systems and the exporting to external systems. It uses published application programming interfaces to facilitate the importing of data from almost any system currently used by banks, including other Midas Kapiti systems, third party products or applications developed in-house. The company says the ‘warehoused’ information can be used to produce a wide range of specialized reports or it can be used by other applications. The first of these applications developed by Midas Kapiti is Risk Vision, designed to give a bank-wide view of the total risk portfolio. It enables a bank to track and control its exposure across risk entitities such as counterparty, issuer, country or industry. It has full drill down facilities, so that if a trading limit has been exceeded, the user can drill down into the detail to see where the problem has occurred. Global Manager and Risk Vision are written for client-server delivery, running on Windows95 or NT clients and currently Hewlett-Packard Co Unix servers. They are fully object-oriented, written in C++ with Visual Basic front end. The data model is written using SQL on a Sybase database, but the company said it could equally run on an Oracle database. Midas-Kapiti product marketing director Joanne Shun said Postipankki has already implemented Global Manager, and is in the final stages of testing Risk Vision. Bayerische Landesbank’s Luxembourg arm is about to start implementation. She said the company will obviously be targetting its installed base, but has already had enquiries from banks not currently using its products. The company will provide risk management consultancy if needed, and pricing depends on the scale of installation and services required, the company said.
