RHB Banking Group Licenses Kamakura Risk Manager for ALM and Risk Management

NEW YORK, July 14, 2011:  Kamakura Corporation announced that RHB Banking Group has licensed KRM for ALM and risk management.  Kamakura Risk Manager fully integrates the management of interest rate, market, credit and liquidity risk while fully capturing the impact of any user-defined risk factors on defaults, prepayments, credit spreads, valuation, cash flow and net income.

It is now widely understood that traditional approaches to “silo” risk management are simply special cases of best practice integrated risk management: a multi-period simulation of random changes in the macro-economic environment where the default probabilities of all counterparties, from retail to corporate to sovereign, move up and down with the economy. All cash flows, financial accruals, credit spreads, defaults and recoveries are captured through this multi-period simulation and embedded options are exercised with the user-specified degree of rationality.  The design of KRM facilitates stress testing, which is a key element of the regulatory regimes worldwide following the recent credit and liquidity crisis.

Kamakura Risk Manager’s powerful ALM capabilities include user-defined multi-factor interest rate models, multiple approaches to prepayment analysis including state of the art logistic probabilities of prepayment, dynamic movements in new business, state of the art options models consistent with the work of Professor Robert Jarrow and modern valuation techniques for valuing complex assets and liabilities such as life insurance policies, bank owned life insurance, non-maturity deposits, servicing rights, and so on.

Earlier this month, Kamakura announced the release of version 7.3 of KRM. The new version, which has been under continuous enhancement for 21 years, has more than 250,000 lines of modern C++ code that analyze credit risk, market risk, interest rate risk, operational risk, liquidity risk, and both economic and regulatory capital adequacy on a fully integrated basis.  Kamakura reported that KRM 7.3 has such enhanced memory management capabilities in KRM that there are no longer any memory size-related barriers to very large Monte Carlo simulations.

KRM version 7.3 operates on a wide variety of relational data base management systems including Netezza, DB2, Oracle, and MS SQL Server.  Kamakura Risk Manager Risk Portal (”KRM-rp”) is a web based reporting system that makes advanced KRM analytics available to risk managers who may not themselves be operators of the KRM system.  KRM version 7.3 is fully compatible with the Kamakura Risk Information Services corporate default probability service, which covers 29,900 public firms in 37 countries.  KRM version 7.3 also seamlessly links to the KRIS sovereign default probability service as well.

For more information on KRM version 7.3, KRM-RP version 4.0, or KRIS please contact Kamakura at [email protected].

About Kamakura Corporation
Founded in 1990, Honolulu-based Kamakura Corporation is a leading provider of risk management information, processing and software. Kamakura has taken Credit Technology Innovation Awards from Credit Magazine each year since 2008. In 2010, Kamakura was the only vendor to win 2 innovation awards, one each with distribution partners Fiserv and Thomson Reuters. Kamakura, along with its distributor Fiserv, was ranked number one in asset and liability management analysis and liquidity risk analysis in the RISK Technology Rankings in 2009. Kamakura Risk Manager, first sold commercially in 1993 and now in version 7.3, was also named in the top five for market risk assessment, Basel II capital calculations, and for “risk dashboard.” Kamakura was also ranked in the RISK Technology Rankings 2008 as one of the world’s top 3 risk information providers for its KRIS default probability service.  The KRIS public firm default service was launched in 2002, and the KRIS sovereign default service, the world’s first, was launched in 2008. KRIS default probabilities are displayed for 4000 corporates and sovereigns via the Reuters 3000 Xtra service and the Thomson Reuters Eikon service. Kamakura has served more than 200 clients ranging in size from $1.5 billion in assets to $1.6 trillion in assets. Kamakura’s risk management products are currently used in 34 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Australia, Japan, China, Korea and many other countries in Asia.

Kamakura has world-wide distribution alliances with Fiserv, Sumisho Computer Systems, Unisys, and Zylog Systems making Kamakura products available in almost every major city around the globe.

For more information contact

Kamakura Corporation
2222 Kalakaua Avenue, Suite 1400, Honolulu, Hawaii 96815
Telephone: 1-808-791-9888
Facsimile: 1-808-791-9898
Information: [email protected]
Web site: www.kamakuraco.com