Torstone to Integrate Risk Calculations into Inferno

Torstone Technologies plans to add trade positioning and risk calculation capabilities to the Inferno post-trade platform, as it continues integrating technology from its acquisition of Percentile last year. 

“Inferno clients are middle-office operations and back office within firms. However, as we integrate the features, Inferno will be available to RiskMine clients and vice versa, enabling Inferno users to take risk calculation for their portfolios in a straightforward manner,” says Anthony Pereira, global head of risk business at Torstone and former chief executive officer at Percentile.

Torstone announced the acquisition of Percentile, a provider of risk and compliance technology, in April last year. Pereira says that although the initial integration took only a few weeks, full integration is an ongoing process.

RiskMine automates data collection, visualization and cleansing. It offers data management for static and reference data, assets and issuers, and time series management for risk factors, including observational analytics required for compliance with the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book regulation. 

Torstone and Percentile were partners prior to the acquisition, and had already begun to integrate their data on the back end. Pereira says Torstone had its own pricing analytics library, which is now being integrated into the risk platform. More features are being cloud-enabled, such as allowing clients to plug in their portfolios and have their assets priced in the cloud. 

The vendor is now working on integrating the technology around trade positioning. “The main focus would be integrating the trading position flow, so that we can have straight-through flow of positioning information that comes through the middle- and back-office accounting of Inferno, and going through RiskMine for risk calculations. That integration enables two-way communications where we can push risk calculations back into Inferno for other requirements, like margining,” Pereira says.    

Pereira hopes the integration will be complete by the end of this year. “Our focus is to get our pricing architecture aligned with Inferno’s trade flows and all running in the cloud this year. We are in the process of that, and we are talking to clients about testing,” he says. 

Torstone partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Mack Gill, chief operating officer at Torstone, says the Inferno platform was first deployed on AWS five years ago. Torstone initially supported clients in London on AWS, but has expanded this to other geographies as AWS itself has grown. 

“AWS is now not just about pure infrastructure, but enables value-added services, such as big data capabilities with Athena, more APIs and additional automation facilities for deployment, scaling, and availability,” Gill says. 

Over the past year, Torstone has gone live with regulated businesses in Scandinavia and Hong Kong in parallel with AWS, opening new datacenters in Stockholm and Hong Kong.

“We are also currently deploying in Canada for Credit Suisse, which is an exciting project for us as we grow our North American presence,” Gill says. “We’ve continued to tune Inferno on AWS, to scale up to process very high-volume environments in real time, which has enabled us to handle the recent market volatility, including for the high-frequency trading flow Torstone supports.”