HARTFORD, CT, and LONDON – October 2, 2018 – Conning, a leading global provider of risk and capital management software and advisory solutions for the insurance industry, today announced the release of Version 7.0 of its suite of risk management software products (GEMS® Economic Scenario Generator, FIRM® Portfolio Analyzer, and ADVISE® Enterprise Risk Modeler), which now includes new Grid-as-a-Service functionality, allowing clients to access processing power via the cloud.
Conning believes that the time has come for financial firms to start taking advantage of the opportunities this new technology affords. "Financial risk modeling has become more sophisticated, increasing the demands on companies' computing infrastructure," said Lorraine Hritcko, Head of Conning's Risk Solutions team.
Hritcko added, "Robust modeling of global economies, capital markets, financial instruments, and complex corporate holdings across tens or hundreds of thousands of scenarios requires an enormous amount of processing power, and modelers may find themselves having to choose between long run times and maintaining large grids of high-powered servers." Hritcko also noted that cloud computing allows computing power to be available on demand, with no cost of ownership when it's not needed. By leveraging economies of scale, simulations can be run at a speed that would be prohibitively expensive to achieve with a dedicated in-house system, enabling larger and, therefore, more informative simulations than were previously practical.
"From the earliest days of stochastic modeling, modelers have taken advantage of advances in computing power, enabling the creation of simulations that would have been infeasible in past decades," said Dan MacKenzie, Risk Solutions Product Manager for Conning. "Taking advantage of the enormous economies of scale that are now available through cloud computing is the natural next step in the evolution of financial risk management. Companies that embrace this technology will have a competitive advantage." MacKenzie added that cloud computing environments have much more stringent security protocols than typical in-house data centers.
Conning (www.conning.com) is a leading global investment management firm with a long history of serving the insurance industry. Conning supports institutional investors, including pension plans, with investment solutions and asset management offerings, award-winning risk modeling software, and industry research. Founded in 1912, Conning has investment centers in Asia, Europe and North America.
Conning's risk management software platform includes GEMS® Economic Scenario Generator, FIRM® Portfolio Analyzer, and ADVISE® Enterprise Risk Modeler, offering greater accuracy in financial risk modeling and providing deeper insights for decision making, regulatory and rating agency compliance, and capital allocation. In addition, the Investment Optimizer module works seamlessly within GEMS®, FIRM® and ADVISE® to perform effective strategic asset allocation analyses and identify optimal investment strategies.
Conning, Inc., Goodwin Capital Advisers, Inc., Conning Investment Products, Inc., a FINRA-registered broker dealer, Conning Asset Management Limited, and Conning Asia Pacific Limited are all direct or indirect subsidiaries of Conning Holdings Limited (collectively, "Conning") which is one of the family of companies owned by Cathay Financial Holding Co., Ltd., a Taiwan-based company.
To provide additional information about Conning's Grid-as-a-Service functionality, Conning's Risk Management team has written Cloud Computing for Financial Risk Modeling, which includes a detailed overview of the security and reliability features built into the system.