SkyBridge Capital Enhances Its Risk Practices with Selection of Imagine’s New Service
Imagine Software, a leading provider of real-time portfolio and risk management solutions worldwide, today announced the debut of a new risk aggregation platform. The Imagine Risk Aggregator, which has already been adopted by SkyBridge Capital, helps all those investing across multiple funds and asset classes around the globe achieve greater transparency into investments, access more meaningful risk analyses, and foster increased investor confidence in risk exposure data.
SkyBridge Capital is a global research driven alternative investment firm with approximately $6.6 billion in total assets under advisement or management as of August 31, 2012.
“We are pleased that SkyBridge Capital selected the Imagine Risk Aggregator to provide advanced risk analytics and reporting,” said Dr. Lance Smith, CEO of Imagine Software. “SkyBridge Capital is well known in the fund of funds industry, so we are honored by their validation of our proven methodologies for risk aggregation.”
Ray Nolte, managing partner and Chief Investment Officer at SkyBridge, said, “When we first heard that Imagine was building a new and enhanced risk aggregation platform, we immediately reached out to the firm. After evaluating the offering, as well as a few other alternatives, we determined that the Imagine Risk Aggregator was a superior solution to meet our standards.”
Tatiana Segal, managing director and Head of Risk Management at SkyBridge, added, “Effective risk management is our mandate. SkyBridge’s selection of the Imagine Risk Aggregator demonstrates our commitment to employ the most sophisticated and cost-effective risk aggregation solution available.”
By independently sourcing information from third parties, verifying, and normalizing the position level data that is typically not accessible by investors, then aggregating the data, and applying common sets of risk analytics and risk scenarios, the Imagine Risk Aggregator maintains fund confidentiality while providing visibility to investors at the summary level. This enables Imagine to provide accurate, comprehensive risk analysis and offers tremendous benefit to clients using the platform.
In the industry, there have been many instances of investors who mistakenly presume their investments are diversified because they invest across different managers, but actually wind up being severely over weighted in a particular issuer, sector, country or other allocation because funds frequently take on similar positions. Unless you have a platform such as the Imagine Risk Aggregator that can deliver all-encompassing risk aggregation, you might never have visibility to this risk until it was too late.
Included in the Imagine Risk Aggregator are interactive data visualization dashboards with drill down functionality, as well as a full suite of detailed, board-quality reporting features. Together, these capabilities empower users to analyze a wide variety of factors including market values, exposures, sensitivities, strategies and sub-strategies, scenarios, Betas, stress tests, and VaR. Also available is a dynamic “what if” tool that enables users to see the immediate risk implications of potential changes to their investment allocations.
“Getting risk aggregation right is critical,” concluded Dr. Smith. “With data formats and risk attributes varying from fund to fund, it’s practically impossible for alternative investment firms to calculate a meaningful view of their aggregated risk without outside assistance. Moreover, without access to position level data, firms cannot even establish an accurate understanding of their exposure to a given issuer, sector, country, or asset class. The Imagine Risk Aggregator solves these problems, by leveraging our extensive risk management background to develop what I believe will be the new industry standard for risk aggregation services.”
