NASDAQ Announces Enhancement of Its Risk Platform to Help Banking and Broker-Dealer Community Manage Real-Time Risk

Nasdaq, a global technology company serving the capital markets and other industries, announced it has made a series of enhancements to its risk technology platform, which is widely used by the banking and broker-dealer community to manage liquidity and market risk. The upgrades will help firms better navigate extreme market conditions, providing a live view of risk across proprietary and client trading portfolios with detailed analytics to support real-time decision-making.

The latest major release of the Nasdaq Risk Platform adds fixed income securities including Government Bonds, Corporate Bonds and Convertible Bonds to offer users a consolidated view of risk across a broad range of asset classes including Fixed Income, Equities and Equity Options, Exchange Traded Derivatives and Foreign Exchange. It also significantly enhances multi-factor and intraday stress testing tools that are capable of isolating and managing specific risks within large and complex scenario sets.

"The extreme volatility in recent weeks has demonstrated the consequences of firms not understanding their intra-day liquidity and market risk. We’ve seen a significant increase in demand from banks and broker-dealers who recognize the importance of being able to distill, analyze, interpret, and act on signals in a genuinely live environment," said Roland Chai, Executive Vice President and Head of Marketplace Technology at Nasdaq. "Our position as both a technology and markets infrastructure provider means that we are uniquely placed to help firms navigate these unprecedented headwinds."

Other significant enhancements include adding an open source distributed streaming system, Kafka, to feed live risk analytics, and fully incorporating Nasdaq Derivatives Pricing into the platform. Delivered via the Nasdaq Risk Platform or standalone, Nasdaq Derivatives Pricing provides streaming option analytics including theoretical prices, greeks and recalibrated option volatilities to clients. The integration enables firms to conduct P&L, Value at Risk (VaR) and stress testing calculations on option portfolios which is done using recalibrated intraday volatility surfaces, a three-dimensional plot mapping option values against the possible strike prices of an underlying stock.