UnRisk - 10 Years After

The Austrian National Holiday was yesterday. This is an important anniversary for us. The launch of "UnRisk" before UnRisk. It was around the national holiday 2000, when we conducted a workshop for the design of the architecture around the bank-proof C++ library and outlined our technical framework and business strategy. 


I am proud that Andreas Binder, CEO of MathConsult, makers of UnRisk, offered me to enter the UnRisk consortium with business development responsibility.
In the pictures you see the first packaging design, and articles in Financial Engineering News and Wilmott .
The coal-faced mathematician and lumberjack "titles" come from that time.

It has been a remarkable and fun journey so far and we are proud of all the work we have  completed through the years and of the customers who selected UnRisk.
  • Sep-2001: the first UnRisk PRICING ENGINE customer, a Swiss private bank (UnRisk 4.1 is now the 17th release)
  • Dec-2002: UnRisk won a call for tender of the Austrian Central Bank(we now have over 30 customers in Austria alone)
  • May-2008: UnRisk FACTORY was released - built on the initiative of 3 banks (FACTORY 2.1 is now the sixth release)
  • Nov-2009: Launch of the UnRisk Academy that packages know how for our customers and prospects 
  • At the same time we have introduced UnRisk-Q the system for quant developers that confirms our commitment to support users and developers
If I need to name the two most original ideas and radical innovation?
  • having transferred the most advances solvers from complex technical systems into finance - asymptotic mathematics approaches, Finite Element with special treatment, advanced techniques from inverse problems research
  • uncompromisingly using Mathematica as our development, communication and  representation platform - on desktops, in networks, in grids, on the web
Much has changed in the world since then, in particular computer technologies, but even more, markets have shifted to new regimes, characterized by almost unimaginable anomalies.

But I am happy to be to say that UnRisk is still as modern and fit-for-purpose as it was planned 10 years ago and the effort to do the fundamentals right, paid back. 

What will happen in the next 10 years? Is there a need to disrupt, or re-invent ourselves?

Where we plan to go, in brief:
  • UnRisk FACTORY as a server application with a fast growing coverage for no-time-to-wasters in front offices, risk controlling and risk management
  • UnRisk-Q and webUnRisk/webMathematica  to support financial consulting and services organizations that want to develop a distinguished Software-as-a-Service (SaaS/web) business
  • UnRisk-Q on the machine infernal. An UnRisk power-quant-personal-supercomputer  that multiplies performance with optimized software, coarse grain parallelization on a local grid and a CUDA framework extension
UnRisk is today in a great position. What we have built is solid and fueled by fast growing new technologies: the numerical foundation. Mathematica. High-performace computing and  transaction processing. Next generation-web support ......  

It is amazing and I look forward with excitement, what lies ahead.