A trio of leaders in risk management, data management and technology launched new risk management services for asset management and insurance on Friday that are designed to save companies time and money.

The US-based financial data management firm Cicada Corporation has joined with the Toronto-based risk management software company Algorithmic and Bermuda-based Investors Guaranty to develop the services.

Hubert Holmes, executive vice president of Cicada Corporation said that new services are designed specifically for the risk management needs of the insurance and asset management industries to help them comply with emerging enterprise-level risk management regulations and the related audit and ratings standards in Europe and North America. These include the demands presented by Basel II, Solvency II and Sarbanes-Oxley.

He said: ?The asset managers have a call from clients to make risk adjusted decisions and make risk management be a part of portfolio management. Whereas before you were only looking at total return ? how much am I making on this portfolio ? now people are looking in an a much more risk adjusted analytical way and there is also regulatory compliance coming to the world of asset managers as well.?

Mr. Holmes says that the group created the hosted solutions for the industry because of the historical problem the banks experienced when implementing their own risk management systems. The banks had to spend a lot of money and devote significant firm resources.

Mr. Holmes said: ?It adds up to a big commitment and the banks for the most part had to foot those bills for themselves and they are multi-million dollar bills. We got together as a group to put together a hosted solution, kind of a managed service around risk management for asset managers and insurance companies so that we take away all of those big up front costs and the big risks of implementing an enterprise risk management system by hosting it ourselves, on our own hardware, with our people and putting a user interface in front of clients that they can configure to their own particular needs.?

Mr. Holmes says that while the service does not give companies the entire flexibility that they would have in owning the software, they are a cost effective and efficient way to start doing risk management.

He said: ?Algorithmic is proven risk management solution in the big bank space.

?The big banks have had to deal with risk adjusted decisions in their portfolio management.

?They have had to deal with capital adequacy around Basel II and a growing regulatory and compliance environment and so they have been a little ahead of the game but that is all coming to the asset management world and to the insurance world. ?

The group have launched two separate products, one for asset managers and a second called Insygne for insurance.

He said: ?We have data centres running now with the Algorithmic software.

?We have data coming in from multiple sources which we deal with and put into the Algorithmic software. Algorithmic software is connected to the client even if it is running in multiple data centres and the client has an interface on their computers which allows them to interface with our data centres.

?They input data that is specific to them, their portfolios and then they can put in the risk factors and scenarios that might happen particularly to them or they can have us do that. Really it becomes a tool that they have to monitor, manage and report on their risk without having to buy and run and deal with software because we?re doing that on their behalf.?