Commercial Bank International adopts Bloomberg MARS as primary risk management system

Bloomberg announced today that Commercial Bank International (CBI), a leading national bank in the UAE, has adopted Bloomberg’s Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS) modules for Counterparty Risk, Market Risk and Valuation.

CBI previously adopted MARS Front Office to aid its LIBOR transition and has now decided to adopt three additional modules of the solution, making MARS the Bank’s primary risk management system. The MARS counterparty risk (XVA) module will notably help address existing regulatory requirements such as SA-CCR for counterparty credit risk capital calculations. The same module provides robust counterparty exposure analytics for derivatives portfolios.

MARS Market Risk module integrates seamlessly to provide a comprehensive solution supporting the risk management and data workflow, providing scalability and allowing further growth of CBI’s treasury business with confidence both in terms of financial product volumes and complexity. 

Finally, MARS Valuations provides credible and complete valuations for derivative portfolios, including over-the-counter derivatives and structured products, ensuring data and pricing consistency across the front-to-back trading workflow cycle.

On this occasion, Randa Kreidieh, Chief Risk Officer at CBI, commented: “Using MARS as our primary risk system enables us to streamline our risk management workflows, quickly implement new financial regulations, and improve our operational efficiencies. By adopting additional MARS modules, we benefit from a comprehensive and integrated set of tools, ensuring data consistency and transparency between the front and back office, and enabling us to automate more processes. Such advancements enable more informed decision-making and efficient operations, which contributes positively to both investment management and customer service aspects of banking.”

“We are pleased to continue to support CBI with streamlining and digitizing its risk management processes by expanding the range of MARS modules into an integrated front to back solution,” said Jose Ribas, Global Head of Risk and Pricing Products at Bloomberg. “The ability to bolt on additional risk capabilities as firms progress on their technology journey is a key feature of our MARS offering, in addition to our broad asset class coverage, our pricing library which includes a range of models and automated enterprise workflow that streamlines the entire risk management process.”

Bloomberg MARS is a suite of risk solutions, which are accessed on the Bloomberg Terminal and via APIs, that provides risk analytics for cash and derivatives securities. MARS enables traders, portfolio and risk managers to manage front office risk, market risk, XVA counterparty risk, credit risk, hedge accounting, as well as collateral and SIMM requirements – all by using a common pricing and data library, providing consistency from front to back. To find out more about Bloomberg’s multi-asset risk solutions

Bloomberg MARS has been recognized across a range of risk management and risk transfer solutions at the 2023 Risk Market Technology Awards, including Market Liquidity Risk Product of the year, Pricing and Analytics: Structured Products/Cross-Asset, and Best Support for Risk Free Rates.