As industry pressures continue to grow, financial services companies are seeking to accelerate their ability to meet increasing regulatory requirements and other business demands, such as CECL, FRTB, traded credit risk, ALM and liquidity, portfolio management and more.
That’s why today, IBM is announcing its acquisition of Armanta, Inc. (Armanta), a provider of aggregation and analytics software to financial services firms. Armanta’s technology platform allows financial institutions to aggregate data across multiple systems in near real-time speed. This helps them enhance their management decision-making and better address regulatory compliance and other market drivers, allowing firms to re-allocate saved capital to innovation initiatives.
Over the past two years, Armanta and IBM have worked together to deliver financial risk solutions to clients globally. The combination of IBM’s and Armanta’s technology and expertise has allowed IBM to deliver new offerings that have already been adopted in the market. Armanta technology has not only enhanced our existing solutions but also allowed IBM to rapidly develop new offerings for clients.
For financial institutions around the world, the addition of Armanta will enable IBM to more effectively manage regulatory mandates by using a common aggregation and reporting solution across multiple risk systems, regardless of whether they are developed in-house or are supplied by a vendor. Clients can also use Armanta to build their enterprise reporting solutions on top of existing analytics. Their powerful aggregation technology will complement current IBM solutions providing clients with the most effective tools for financial risk.
Armanta also provides the ability to instantly visualize complex analyses and different “what-if” scenarios in a secure, sandbox environment, allowing users to act decisively.
With this acquisition, IBM will help clients further integrate their risk management practices with other front or back office functions, while also establishing a common set of data, analytics and reports for business-wide consistency.
As the pace and volume of demand for analytics increase, aggregation and reporting can become bottlenecks and inhibitors to business performance. Armanta and IBM’s combined industry expertise and technology has long been sought after by financial risk professionals, traders and portfolio managers to help them achieve their regulatory and business requirements. This acquisition not only expands our software-as-a-service offerings, but further supports our common clients as they adopt Big Data architectures and expand their API ecosystems.
Post-acquisition, IBM has plans of integrating the Armanta business as part of the Watson Financial Services portfolio, further strengthening IBM’s financial risk analytics services.