Innovation Catalysts

Comparative large financial institutions are given advantages: infrastructure, strong brand reputation, partner relationships, scientific knowledge, process excellence and experience with regulators.


To support innovation catalysts, companies must embrace open innovation, decentralize decision making and make innovation purpose driven.  One key to a shift may be to bundling internal competences with those of external passionate entrepreneurial companies.

Raiffeisen Capital Management (KAG) is Austria's leading investment fund company in market share. RCM has developed into a leading player in the fields of Global Fixed Income and Multi-Asset Strategies with strong positions not only in Austria, but Northern Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe.

At RCM two departments separated from the fund management are monitoring risk.

Michael Schmid, Risk Management, selected UnRisk PRICING ENGINE 2003. 2005 he started the management of "CONTEGO", a project for an in-house developed, integrated market risk system that is built on a full valuation approach employing historical simulation.

Michael Schmid required that valuation and data management needs to be combined and centralized, fully understanding that valuation and calibration engines need to be blazingly fast, but accurate and analyze deal types from the Vanilla to the most sophisticated. He decided to use the UnRisk engines, scenario builders and VaR calculations that we grid-enabled - it now supports a grid with 40 computational kernels in parallel, crunching tons of prices and risk spectra that are automatically aggregated, analyzed against the existing system limits and documented over night.

This was our first - customized -  risk factory application. Michael Schmid catalyzed its core innovations and structure. UnRisk FACTORY was released 2008 - on demand of innovation catalysts of 3 banks.

Michael Schmid will present the challenges and achievements of their optimized market risk system at the 11 Year of UnRisk Summit.