A big minimalist solution for those stuck in the middle – UnRisk Factory combines the UnRisk pricing engine and the web for small and medium size enterprises.

The idea that small to medium size enterprises are as demanding as their larger counterparts does not make sense at first thought. Logically, if you’re smaller, have less people to manage and possibly less operations, you should need fewer, simpler tools for your day to day operations, right?

The answer is no. According to Herbert Exner at UnRisk derivatives, the functional requirements of small
and medium sized financial institutions are equally demanding.

Exner explains that these institutions are more focused – in terms of strategies, market segments and product diversification – but they need feature-rich systems that are easy to set up and manage, which coincides with UnRisk’s minimalist infrastructure approach.

Hence, grid computing, the hot topic of the day, is a solution for these “stuck in the middle” institutions.

Exner believes that quantitative finance and high performance computing are ‘twins’. “The reduction of time-to-insight, real time risk management and finally quantitative enterprise management need enormous computing power, which cannot be provided by single processors”.
The UnRisk consortium is a partnership between MathConsult, headed up by Andreas Binder, and Uni
Software Plus, both operating from Linz, Austria. With 60 mathematicians working on fundamental research at MathConsult, its UnRisk division is heavily committed to research and development, which account for over 35 per cent of UnRisk’s total turnover, ten times above the Austrian average. The UnRisk PRICING ENGINE is based on the Mathematica platform. It is that platform's gridMathematica which the consortium is now putting to good use with FACTORY.

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