A Short Story of Being Lucky ...

Last Monday, Andreas and myself had one of our little social meetings - sitting in a wine bar and smell the aroma of a nice Riesling or Chardonnay and we let serotonin spike a sense of well being .... in such an open atmosphere we have had the one or the other good idea.

On Monday we thought that valuable lessons can be learned from a trip down the memory lane.

1997 - Our engagement in finance started with a workshop for a London based trading desk of RBC. The problem: pricing of convertible bonds with quite complex contract features. At that workshop Andreas found that Adaptive Integration is the adequate method - and tree based methods are bad. This was the birth of a lumberjack.

2001 - After having experienced that not only Adaptive Integration, but also other numerical schemes should be transferred from complex technical system to finance, for better results, we took UnRisk PRICING ENGINE 1.0 to financial institutions

2002 - We won a call for tender of the Austrian Central Bank to value complex structured interest rate products that were traded

2004 - We supported a large Swiss Bank with their Model Validation

2006 - We released our flagship product, the UnRisk FACTORY - combining valuation and data management, grid enabling the engine and building UnRisk Services that tie everything together and into a web front-end

2009 - We established the UnRisk Academy to extend product-use training with courses giving full explanation on quantitative theories, mathematical approaches and critical implementations

2011 - With releasing UnRisk-Q, the programming power behind UnRisk has been unleashed

2012 - We celebrated 11 years  of UnRisk in a summit - with inspiring talks  of our customers covering fields from portfolio composition on an iPad to SaaS risk management with on-demant online access

2013 - Having disrupted ourselves we decided to bundle the FACTORY and UnRisk-Q to a solution and development system in one and we reinvent UnRisk making its foundation multi language (C++, Python, Mathematica, MatLab, ...), platform agnostic (CPU/GPU hybrids) and inherently parallel.

Begin Jul-13 "A Workout in Computational Finance" by Michael Aichinger and Andreas Binder will be released by Wiley ... and we are bursting of new ideas .. a few born on Mondays.