PortfolioScience: Powerful Portfolio Risk Analysis
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PortfolioScience: Powerful Portfolio Risk Analysis

CIO VendorIttai Korin, Founder & CEO
When trying to maximize returns and stay competitive, it is highly important for hedge fund firms to assess and mitigate risk, all while complying with regulatory mandates with greater visibility. To this end, firms are seeking risk management solutions that are quick and effective in monitoring portfolios and producing useful analytical insights. PortfolioScience, a risk analysis service provider, offers RiskAPI, a hosted risk analysis solution that allows users to access powerful portfolio risk analysis functionality via a remote, dynamic API. “Rather than handing over only a pre-built risk report, we give users the tools that empower them to dig as deep as they want to generate a risk infrastructure for their fund,” says Ittai Korin, Founder and CEO, PortfolioScience. “We bring high performance and extensibility to the table.”

PortfolioScience provides users with the tools to create extensive analytical functionalities, bringing the entire sphere of quantitative analytics to the user’s fingertips. Clients are not required to gather relevant data as the RiskAPI software-as-a-service includes all the necessary historical pricing, computing power, and mathematics required to generate sophisticated portfolio and position-level risk analysis. Using any of the various operating environments including Excel, data warehouses, PMS, EMS, and OMS systems, users can connect to RiskAPI and easily set up a robust and systematic risk management infrastructure for their hedge fund. Delivered as a remote API, the service allows hedge funds to access the PortfolioScience proprietary risk analysis engine, delivering robust risk analysis functionality. “Unlike the traditional approach, our approach is a live, fully functional service operating in the cloud.”

Korin elaborates that for smaller organizations that do not have the budget for large infrastructure or simply do not need a firm-wide implementation, “The excel add-in version of RiskAPI quickly delivers customizable risk calculations within a spreadsheet”.


We bring high performance and extensibility to the table


The company also offers an Enterprise version of RiskAPI that allows larger companies to build entire risk applications on a firm-wide basis. “Our Enterprise version enables users to perform high performance custom, automated risk capture,” states Korin. PortfolioScience’s engagement with a large asset management firm is an effective case in point. The client deals with a number of portfolios under its umbrella and was grappling with intra-day risk monitoring for several portfolio managers in its system. After initially approaching several traditional risk management vendors that only offered expensive static reports, they reached out to PortfolioScience. Upon the implementation of RiskAPI Enterprise, the client could dynamically and quickly run a bevy of different calculations including stress testing, exposure analysis, options analytics, and risk evaluation on a firm-wide basis throughout the day—on all its underlying portfolio managers and their positions. “We achieved this in a cost-effective and a high performance manner,” asserts Korin.

PortfolioScience also partners with service providers that intend to step into risk management while catering to the hedge fund industry. “Because we deliver our solution through an on-demand API, these service providers are able to offer risk management seamlessly to their clients,” says Korin.

Led by Korin, PortfolioScience is dedicated to continuously working toward bringing newer portfolio risk analysis solutions to clients, in line with the increasing complexity of the hedge fund industry. A perfect example of this is the recently launched Factor Index Construction Toolset, which allows users to dynamically construct factor indices based on dozens of fundamental, technical, and statistical metrics. “We are constantly adding new capabilities both in the analytical toolset—new calculations and innovative models—as well as in interface capabilities to interact with our system,” concludes Korin.