RS Edge Platform Implementation Streamlined Processes Reducing Client Resource Support Needs by 46%-VERSION 2

Asset Manager | New York, NY

RiskSpan Applications Provided

Edge Portfolio

MARKET RISK ANALYTICS

Edge-Predictive

MODELS & FORECASTING

Edge-Perspective

MODEL VALIDATION

Edge-Predictive""

GOVERNANCE

ABOUT THE CLIENT

A leading provider of capital and services to the mortgage and financial services industries that leverage their proven investment expertise and identity and invest in assets that offer attractive risk-adjusted returns while also protecting our existing portfolio and generating long-term value for our investors.

PROBLEM

An asset manager sought to replace an inflexible risk system provided by a Wall Street dealer. The portfolio was diverse, with a sizable concentration in structured securities and mortgage assets.

The legacy analytics system was rigid with no flexibility to vary scenarios or critical investor and regulatory reporting.

CHALLENGE

Lacked a single-solution

Data integrity issues

Inflexible locally installed risk management system

No direct connectivity to downstream systems

Models + Data management = End-to-end Managed Process

HIGHLIGHTS

GET STARTED

5 Vendors → Single Platform

32% Annual Cost Savings

Increased Flexibility

Additional

DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

SOLUTION

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform delivered a cost-efficient and flexible solution by bundling required data feeds, predictive models for mortgage and structured products, and infrastructure management.

The Platform manages and validates the asset manager’s third-party and portfolio data and produces scenario analytics in a secure hosted environment.

TESTIMONIAL

”Our existing daily process for calculating, validating, and reporting on key market and credit risk metrics required significant manual work… [Edge] gets us to the answers faster, putting us in a better position to identify exposures and address potential problems.”

— Managing Director, Securitized Products

EDGE PROVIDED

END-TO-END DATA AND RISK MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

Scalable, cloud native technology
Increased flexibility to run analytics at loan level; additional interactive / ad-hoc analytics
Reliable accurate data with frequent updates

COST AND OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCIES GAINED

Streamlined workflows | Automated processes
32% annual cost savings
46% fewer resources needed for maintenance

RS Edge Platform Implementation Streamlined Processes Reducing Client Resource Support Needs by 46%-VERSION 1

AT-A-GLANCE

An asset manager sought to replace an inflexible risk system provided by a Wall Street dealer. The portfolio was diverse, with a sizable concentration in structured securities and mortgage assets.

The legacy analytics system was rigid with no flexibility to vary scenarios or critical investor and regulatory reporting.

5 Vendors → Single Platform

32% Annual Cost Savings

Increased Flexibility

Additional Ad-hoc Analytics

”Our existing daily process for calculating, validating, and reporting on key market and credit risk metrics required significant manual work… [Edge] gets us to the answers faster, putting us in a better position to identify exposures and address potential problems.”

— Managing Director, Securitized Products

LET US BUILD YOUR SOLUTION

Models + Data management = End-to-end Managed Process

CHALLENGES

Lacked a single-solution

Data integrity issues

Inflexible locally installed risk management system

No direct connectivity to downstream systems

SOLUTIONS

RiskSpan’s Edge Platform delivered a cost-efficient and flexible solution by bundling required data feeds, predictive models for mortgage and structured products, and infrastructure management.

The Platform manages and validates the asset manager’s third-party and portfolio data and produces scenario analytics in a secure hosted environment.

EDGE WE PROVIDED

End-to-end data and risk management platform

Scalable, cloud native technology
Increased flexibility to run analytics at loan level; additional interactive / ad-hoc analytics
Reliable accurate data with frequent updates

Cost and operational efficiencies gained

Streamlined workflows | Automated processes
32% annual cost savings
46% fewer resources needed for maintenance

RiskSpan Chosen “Best Company for Diversity and Inclusion” Category Winner in WatersTechnology’s Women In Technology & Data Awards 2022 Rankings

RiskSpan Chosen “Best Company for Diversity and Inclusion” by WatersTechnology Women In Technology & Data Awards 2022

Learn More about riskspan's Dei initiatives

The award reflects RiskSpan’s major commitment to making DEI a priority and empowering employees from every background and at every level of the company to contribute to our mutual success.

Recent initiatives have included:

A broad expansion and formalization of a mentorship program pairing every non-management employee with a senior company leader.
Regular anonymous surveys designed to gauge employee perceptions of inclusion and identify opportunities for improvement.
Establishment of a Women’s Employee Resource Group featuring forums, dinners, and other social events.
Active participation in industry DEI committees and events.
Development of training frameworks open to all employees seeking help obtaining certifications and customized training programs.

These and related efforts all aim to create a close-knit organization by maximizing opportunities for communication among staff across the organization and creating more opportunities to get to know one another in smaller groups outside of assigned projects and teams.

RiskSpan’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Initiative

RSOne Vision

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion has been a recent focus of RiskSpan as of early 2021, and Managing Director Christabel James has led the effort. She works closely with RiskSpan’s executive team to initiate and build out RSOne DEI strategies. Christabel has established a mentoring program and organized a number of team building events. She is also active in coordinating and attending events geared towards women in finance.

Formal Mentorship Programs

Open to all employees companywide
One on one conversations with team members to understand their personal and career aspirations and match them to a mentor
Guide executive and management team on mentorship community
Heavily promote reverse mentoring
Created and shared guides with both mentors and mentees providing guidance on the program

Engagement

Implement DEI Images for laptop screensavers
Host competitions with the goal of raising awareness
Initiate and share results of survey along with action items

Observances

Established Juneteenth as a corporate holiday
Regular companywide communication drawing attention to a DEI resources

Women’s Employee Resource Group (ERG)

Established ERG to support and encourage the women in the firm
Established a women’s forum and schedule individual conversations with junior staff
Hosted female’s get together which included women at all levels from associate analysts to CEO

Industry DEI Committees and Events

RiskSpan is an active contributor to the Structured Finance Association’s DEI Toolkit Initiative, which provides guidance and resources on best practices related to DEI. SFA’s Toolkit includes a combination of video interviews, member-written blogs, articles, podcasts, and member-firm submitted resources centered around diversity recruitment.
Participated in the Virtual National Diversity and Leadership Conference 2021

Training Framework

Available to anyone seeking assistance with certifications and customized training programs
Built a framework for team to take advantage of courses included as part of memberships for free or a reduced cost
RS Portal integration was initiated

What Is Your DEI Strategy?

Inclusive Recruitment

Christabel James | DEI Lead, RiskSpan

Christabel James

*This post by RiskSpan’s Christabel James was originally published in February 2022 by the Structured Finance Association.

Companies that have implemented intentional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and strategies have not only a great and inclusive corporate culture, but also increased employee retention, productivity, quality of decision making – all of which positively impact the bottom-line.

Building a strong, diverse, and inclusive culture starts with recruitment, the beginning of the employee life cycle.

What does it mean to be inclusive in recruitment? Why is inclusive recruitment important? How can we proactively implement inclusive recruitment practices? Read on to find out how inclusive recruitment cannot only strengthen you DEI policies but be a powerful tool that helps shape the culture, the bottom line, and perceived value of the company.

What is inclusive recruitment?

While it seems like machines are replacing most jobs, people continue to be an organization’s most valuable asset. There is not denying that the quality of a company’s human resources, and their active engagement, continues to drive business performance. Research from Gallup has shown that disengaged employees cost companies $450-to-$550 billion in lost productivity annually. Given, this, recruitment is the first step to attracting bright and diverse talent, encouraging not only diversity but also increased engagement and inclusiveness.

Inclusive recruitment recognizes that diverse talent exists and employs practical, intentional tools to not only attract, but also level the playing field for this talent and in the process removes unconscious biases and discriminations that plague traditional processes. Inclusive recruitment ensures that candidates are hired based on their skills, abilities, and expertise, and not based on their characteristics or background.

Why is inclusive recruitment important?

It’s no surprise that hiring a diverse workforce that brings in potentially diverse thought leadership is critical in today’s competitive business landscape. While companies are bound by law to treat every candidate equally, what is also important for businesses is the impact that their corporate culture has on the branding of their organization. A company whose culture emphasizes diversity and inclusion signals greater acceptance of diverse talent, thereby attracting a larger, more diverse talent pool, all of which positively impact not only the company’s bottom-line, but also, its reputation. According to Pew Research Center, millennials are the largest generation in the US workforce and in a research by the Read More

RiskSpan and Verisk Collaborate to Offer Climate Risk Analytics for Mortgage Finance

Mortgage analytics firm RiskSpan has collaborated with Verisk to create a first-of-its-kind solution for measuring and mitigating the risks of climate change to the housing finance industry. The collaboration unites RiskSpan’s Edge Platform for mortgage analytics with Verisk Extreme Event Solutions’ proven set of models — relied on by leading insurance, re-insurance, corporate and government entities, to assess the risk from natural catastrophes and climate to a given location by providing a property-specific hazard risk metric.

“Verisk’s ground-up approach to property-specific risk analysis is the perfect complement to our loan-level approach to mortgage credit and prepayment modeling,” said Janet Jozwik, the managing director heading up RiskSpan’s contribution to the new partnership. “We are excited to layer Verisk’s unique property risk scoring into our existing credit and portfolio risk framework.”

“Our collaboration with RiskSpan will serve to greatly benefit the housing finance industry by adding critical data and analytics from Verisk’s catastrophe models during the loan screening process,” observed Roger Grenier, senior vice president of Verisk’s global resilience practice. “This added layer of portfolio management can help banks and financial institutions better understand the potential risk from extreme weather events to a given property.”

The risk to the housing finance industry from extreme events is significant. According to Verisk, 62 million residential locations are at moderate to extreme risk of flooding alone.

“We are thrilled to bring the powerful climate and hazard risk analytics of Verisk to our clients,” said Bernadette Kogler, chief executive officer, RiskSpan. “This alliance opens the door to a world of property-level data from the insurance industry that can have tremendous value for applications in the mortgage space.”

“The collaborative solution will bring together the best extreme event models, data and climate analytics to the mortgage finance industry,” concluded Bill Churney, president, Verisk’s Extreme Event Solutions unit. “With financial institutions facing increased pressure to factor climate risk into their decision making, we expect RiskSpan’s enhanced tools powered by Verisk to be a welcome addition to their risk management process.”

The collaboration offers two complementary products, including loan-level scoring and climate stress testing, with applications for loan screening, portfolio management, and financial disclosures.

About RiskSpan

RiskSpan offers end-to-end solutions for data management, risk management analytics, and visualization on a highly secure, fast, and fully scalable platform that has earned the trust of the industry’s largest firms. Combining the strength of subject matter experts, quantitative analysts, and technologists, RiskSpan’s Edge Platform integrates a range of data-sets – structured and unstructured – and off-the-shelf analytical tools to provide you with powerful insights and a competitive advantage. Learn more at www.riskspan.com.

About Extreme Event Solutions at Verisk

Extreme event solutions at Verisk (formerly AIR Worldwide) provides risk modeling solutions that help individuals, businesses, and society become more resilient to extreme events. In 1987, Verisk founded the catastrophe modeling industry and today models the risk from natural catastrophes, supply chain disruptions, terrorism, pandemics, casualty catastrophes, and cyber incidents. Insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government clients rely on Verisk’s advanced science, software, and consulting services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked securities, longevity modeling, site-specific engineering analyses, and agricultural risk management. Verisk’s extreme event solutions team is headquartered in Boston, with additional offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.air-worldwide.com. For more information about Verisk, a leading data analytics provider serving customers in insurance, energy and specialized markets, and financial services, please visit www.verisk.com.

GET STARTED WITH A RISKSPAN EXPERT TODAY!

Webinar: Geocoding Mortgage Data for ESG and Climate Risk Analysis

Recorded: February 16th | 1:00 p.m. ET

Geocoding remains a particularly vexing challenge for the mortgage industry. Lenders, servicers, and loan/MSR investors know the addresses of the properties securing their mortgage assets. But most data pertaining to climate and other ESG considerations is available only by matching to a census tract or latitude/longitude.

And if you have ever tried mapping addresses, you know this exercise can be a lot harder than it looks. Fortunately, a growing body of geocoding tools and techniques is emerging to make the process more manageable than ever, even with less than perfect address data.

Our panel presents a how-to guide on geocoding logic and its specific application to the mortgage space. You will learn a useful waterfall approach for linking census-tract-level, geo-specific data for climate risk and ESG to the property addresses in your portfolio.

Featured Speakers

Suhrud Dagli

Chief Innovation Officer, RiskSpan

Jason Huang

Manager, RiskSpan

Jason Lee

Software Engineer, RiskSpan

Institutionally Focused Broker-Dealer: Product Service

As a new MBS operation, this institutional broker-dealer needed trade capture and analytics functionality, particularly for risk management purposes. The broker-dealer also required an application to track MBS pass-through positions in real-time, given the active trading style of its pass-through desk (an average of 3 trades per minute).

The Solution

The client adopted the Edge Platform and RiskSpan provided custom development services that included:

A real-time pass-through matrix Start-of-Day/ Intra-day firm-wide position upload (taking a feed from a proprietary books-and-records system)
Real-time trade capture from Bloomberg and internal sources

The pass-though desk actively used the pass-through matrix for several years. When the client developed its own internal solution, it continued using the Edge Platform to run daily risk scenarios on the firm’s positions.

Total development time for all these projects was about 6 weeks.

National Property and Casualty Insurance Carrier : Claims Platform Migration

A national property and casualty insurance carrier was struggling with an antiquated claims platform. Built on the IBM AS400 Mainframe system, the existing platform was unable to scale up to the growing needs of the organization and was based on legacy code plagued with significant “technical debt.”

The Solution

RiskSpan partnered with the client to identify and vet out a cloud-based SaaS solution provider to function as the system of record for all claims processed within the organization. This partnership ran from the discovery phase all the way through the production roll-out and post roll-out business-as-usual phase.

RiskSpan also assisted with the data migration ETL project necessary to transfer existing open and recent claims to the new platform. All existing interfaces with internal systems and third parties were reconfigured to be functional with the new claims platform.

SPEAK TO AN EXPERT

Client Benefit

Cloud adoption enabled the client to improve its technology capability score from AM Best Ratings, a key metric for evaluating the health of insurance carriers.

Project deliverables included:

Documentation of the current state of all internal and external interfaces
Design and Solution Architecture for impacted interfaces
API Design and Data Normalization across the Claims enterprise
API Interfaces using Reactive Programming principles
Implementation of the required security compliance for all data transmissions to and from the public cloud
Integration with Azure identity systems for SSO Integration
Automated Integration testing
Data Lake on SQL Server to facilitate data migration
Financial Reporting from Data Lake using Tableau Server
Agile Project Delivery with 4-week sprints using SAFe Release Trains.
Technology Stack – Java, Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, Spring Security, AS400 DataQueues, Azure SSO, JIRA, Jenkins, Gradle, OAuth 2, Tomcat, GIT, Gerrit, JSON, XML, SQL, Stored Procedures.

National Property and Casualty Insurance Carrier: Customer Self Service Portal

A national property and casualty insurance carrier needed to modernize its customer self–service portal. The complexity of the existing portal made it difficult for customers to find what they were looking for, resulting in declining customer engagement. The existing system was also inflexible and failed to align with the company’s new products and brand identity.

The Solution

RiskSpan led the development of a state-of-the-art, web-based application enabling customers to resolve a full range of self-service needs without resorting to a customer service call. The solution was developed using the Design Thinking approach, putting users first and offering a simplified and seamless experience when servicing policies.

Client Benefits

The technical architecture laid the foundation for all future web-based applications to be developed within the organization.

The new portal was sufficiently flexible to support rapid deployment of new features relating to the changing product landscape owing to increases in recent catastrophic events.

Other client deliverables included:

Technical Architecture for the proposed JavaScript front-end platform which would be supported by a micro-services based backend system
Proof of Concept delivery with Rapid Prototyping
Implemented a React based Front end application with reusable component libraries
Component libraries have been implemented in the organization’s new branding aesthetic and will be made available through an internal component repository that can be leveraged by all applications.
Optimized solution to meet future performance demands and scaling to ensure a consistent user experience
A/B Testing capabilities to ensure continual user engagement
Agile Project Delivery with 2-week sprints using SAFe Release Trains
Kanban Development adopted post production roll-out with interrupt capacity planning to rapidly address issues that might come up in production.
Unified code-base to support application delivery over mobile apps as well
Technology Stack – Typescript, React.js, React Native, Material UI, Redux, Java, Spring Boot, Spring Security, JIRA, Jenkins, Gradle, OAuth 2, Node.js, Tomcat, GIT, Gerrit, JSON.

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Asset Manager | New York, NY

ABOUT THE CLIENT

PROBLEM

CHALLENGE

HIGHLIGHTS

SOLUTION

TESTIMONIAL

EDGE PROVIDED

AT-A-GLANCE

CHALLENGES

SOLUTIONS

EDGE WE PROVIDED

RSOne Vision

Inclusive Recruitment

Recorded: February 16th | 1:00 p.m. ET

Featured Speakers

Company

Products

Security & Compliance