Asset Control, the reference data specialists, has released what it calls AC Contour. It is a tool for creating and visualizing curves and surfaces used in the financial markets. These include volatilities, correlation and variance covariance matrices, zero curves and bond curves. AC Contour was designed in close cooperation with risk and trading experts at six Asset Control customer.
“Why should financial institutions go through major software integration to view and analyze the pricing data they already have? With AC Contour, our customers can immediately transform their raw data into the derived curves and volatilities they need for risk management and trading analytics. Or they can build proprietary models on the fly,” says Ger Rosenkamp, CEO of Asset Control. “AC Contour is designed to work with either AC Plus in-house data management or our ACDEX outsourced service. It’s the newest example of Asset Control’s commitment to helping our customers gain maximum value from the data they already have.”
Asset Control describes AC Contour as follows:
“A user tool that creates standard and highly customizable curves and surfaces, based on historical or projected time-series data, delivered in full-color, three-dimensional visualizations. It leverages a firm’s data resources maintained in an in-house Asset Control implementation or outsourced to the ACDEX industry utility. AC Contour includes an out-of-the-box library of standard curves, including bond curves, zero-coupon swap curves, FX forwards conversion curves, volatilities, synthetic FX options volatilities, correlations and variance-covariance matrices. AC Contour is also a complete development environment for curves, with an intuitive wizard to assist users in rapidly defining, altering or creating new curves. AC Contour is highly flexible, converting data to enhanced data, such as prices to implied volatility, converting one type of curve into another, and enabling scenario analysis through altered attributes. The curve manager coordinates queries with any underlying data model and enables storage of the curve results in the system. Built on state-of-the-industry Java and XML technology, AC Contour serves as a quick-to-implement point solution. Alternately, the curve formation is fully exportable and can be integrated into other applications, such as Microsoft Excel.