General description on the system
QuIC provides the world's leading financial organizations with bespoke solutions to power their risk management, pricing and financial analytics. With the advanced vectorized technology of the QuIC Engine, our solutions perform highly complex, large-scale calculations. From intra-day portfolio analysis to rapid implementation of new models and financial instruments, our technology allows industry leaders to stay ahead of the market and ahead of the competition.
The QuIC Capital Modelling and Risk Platform provides an open, flexible modelling and simulation platform well-suited to the requirements of an insurer attempting to run their business on the basis of capital and risk utilization.
QuIC's insurance solution leverages our proven track record of regulatory approval excellence, assisting insurers of all sizes, across all markets, to meet evolving regulatory standards.
Every implementation is designed with respect to specific client requirements and circumstances, providing an exceptional level of flexibility and customization. Furthermore, QuIC is an open platform that empowers end-users with a workbench environment to separately create, test, analyze and verify models.
Functions performed
QuIC provides an industrial strength solution that helps to demonstrate adequate capitalization, offering highly productive tools to help personnel with modelling and reporting requirements.
- ERM - the ability to offer a consolidated view of risk across all business units
- Valuation and pricing
- Hedging analysis
- Capital modelling
- Counterparty credit risk
- Market risk
- Scenario generation
- Stress testing
- Risk aggregation
Specific Solvency II features
Our solution provides insurers with an easily customizable, transparent, scalable and extremely robust system for calculating Solvency II capital requirements, particularly for internal model validation and embedding risk and solvency into decision-making processes.
The intelligent implementation of new technology and business processes can result in lower capital requirements and reduced reinsurance costs. QuIC gives insurers the ability to model their business and risk simulations according to their own unique mix of products and processes, with coverage across risks and simulations of correlated and co-dependent risks. We can pull existing models into the system or create new models.
Modelling capabilities include, among others, the ability to incorporate fungibility constraints into the risk model; segmentation of risks; tail dependencies; and a flexible approach to the analysis of losses. We remove the need to estimate unknown risks when calculating your solvency position. Once all risks have been modelled, we provide comprehensive and exceptionally rapid aggregation capabilities.
Features relevant to Solvency II compliance include:
- Transparency, auditability and control of the model
- Stochastic simulation framework
- Internal model calculation kernel
- Aggregation of risk types
- Insurance/underwriting
- Credit
- Market
- Operational
- Replicating portfolios
- Curve fitting
- Profit & loss attribution
- Fungibility of capital considerations
- Calculation/incorporation of correlation matrices and copulas
The management of the large volumes of data necessary for Solvency II, including creating the required storage capacity of historical data and corresponding audit information, is a key challenge. Risk scenario runs under Solvency II will be larger and more complicated and the results of these runs will be required by key business decision-makers in shorter periods of time than has been required previously. QuIC's ability to manage the data involved is one of the key reasons why Lloyd's of London acquired QuIC's technology platform to implement its Solvency II framework.
Specifications
QuIC can accommodate and embrace your existing technology and accounting infrastructure. Using QuIC Script and a set of pre-configured, open-source algorithms, QuIC provides a flexible modelling framework that takes data direct from your existing portfolio management, accounting and risk systems and then performs the millions of simulations and risk calculations necessary for internal model and/or standard model approval.
QuIC enables the rapid delivery of proofs of concept and quick implementations, particularly for internal model validation. The power and processing speed of the QuIC solution enables solvency positions to be calculated on a daily or even intra-day basis, in addition to monthly or quarterly runs for regulatory or external reporting requirements.
Driving QuIC's product offering is the QuIC Engine, which supplies the core computational capabilities powering the QuIC Platform. Acting similarly to a virtual machine the QuIC Engine can be instantiated on Windows or Linux platforms, and is implemented in C++ to provide maximum performance while preserving operating-system platform portability.
The QuIC Engine as part of the QuIC Platform can be packaged as either a remote service, an array of deployable solutions such as dynamic linkable libraries (Windows DLL) or shared object libraries (Unix/Linux), or a linkable library for single desktop usage (Windows). Because the QuIC Engine is scalable from single desktops to distributed clusters, users are able to develop and test new instrument models in a desktop environment, then deploy the exact same code to a distributed grid for large-scale portfolio calculations without any changes to the code.
QuIC also supports grid solutions such as DataSynapse GridServer®, Microsoft HPC. etc.
The QuIC Platform can be embedded into third party applications. Third party applications can submit calculation requests to the QuIC Engine, fully leveraging the capabilities of distributed computing environments like grids. A wide range of application and data interfaces exist that include COM, linkable C++ libraries, and client-side libraries to distributed elements of the QuIC Platform.
Licensing/sales/support
QuIC typically provides software for a five-year licence term, with an annual maintenance charge entitling the client to the error-fixing service and new releases of software.
We provide consultancy services to ensure the successful implementation of our solution on time and to budget. The capabilities provided include project management, business analysis, financial engineering/modelling and technical services towards this end. A client wanting full control over the modelling of the solution is afforded this option via the open source approach to our solution. QuIC strives to empower clients through a training program devised to promote self-sufficiency.
Any new releases would be provided at no additional cost, apart from any implementation support that may be required.
Types of user
QuIC's clients are amongst the world's top institutions. We have a wide variety of risk modelling solutions involving our QuIC Product Suite. Our clients are based in the following industries:
- Insurance
- Investment Banking
- Energy/commodities
- Hedge Funds
We have numerous clients who have chosen us to perform compliance for Solvency II and Basel II, for example Lloyd's and MBIA.
A particular issue for Lloyd's is that key input for their internal model will come from the internal models of syndicates. Lloyd's has chosen the QuIC Capital Modelling and Risk Platform to build the model that quantifies the Lloyd's central fund capital requirement. One of the main advantages for Lloyds of QuIC's platform is that it provides an intuitive development method which enables Lloyd's actuaries to work closely with the QuIC risk modelling specialists.
We have validated the Solvency II model developed for the UK subsidiary of MBIA; part of the requirement was to use not only the consultancy skills of our staff in validating the model, but also the use of own software to produce output which could be audited.
Areas/countries with the most users
QuIC is a company with clients worldwide serving many jurisdictions; our main client base is Europe.
Contact person and details
Email: sales@quic.com
Website: www.quic.com
EMEA
Caroline Tonkin
Tel: +44 20 7562 4570
Asia
Mark Putnam
Tel: +61 400 043 111
North America
Liam Cuddy
Tel: +1 212 792 4190