Bankers Trust Spins Off Risk Software Specialist

Bankers Trust Corp. completed the spinoff this week of a risk management technology company.

Operational Risk Inc. sells operational risk-measurement software that incorporates eight years of methodology development at Bankers Trust, said Douglas A. Hoffman, chief executive officer.

The software is called Orca, for operational risk control and analysis. It includes a data base of publicly available information on bank losses due to operational failures.

Risk measurement is based on actuarial techniques used in the insurance industry and statistical tools that assess a number of risk indicators to identify operational weaknesses.

Bankers Trust decided to spin off the company because of "a number of inquiries" from other banks about the tools it developed, said Mr. Hoffman, formerly director of operational risk at Bankers Trust.

The spinoff is occurring at a "logical time," he added, as the bank is trying "to figure out where people will go" once its acquisition by Deutsche Bank is complete.

ORI's staff will consist of a few employees from Bankers Trust's operational risk group and other departments.

So far, Matt Kimber, a vice president in the London corporate risk office, and Anand Sahasram, a vice president in the bank's brokerage division, have been tapped to become ORI executives.

ORI is not the first technology company to be hatched from within Bankers Trust. In risk management, where the institution is considered a pioneer, it last year spun out IQ Financial Systems Inc., which sells market and credit risk measurement software.

Zoologic Inc., another New York-based spinoff, sells educational software for risk management and other areas of trading and finance. In the electronic commerce security field, Certco Inc. of New York and GlobeSet Inc. of Austin, Tex., have Bankers Trust roots.

Some senior bank executives have left to form independent risk software companies.

NetRisk of Greenwich, Conn., was founded in 1997 by Eugene B. Shanks, who as president of Bankers Trust in the late 1980s and early 1990s led its efforts in derivatives trading and risk management. NetRisk products include the RiskOps operational risk system.

Kelsey Biggers, who led Bankers' Raroc 2020 risk service team, which offered a proprietary risk-adjusted-return-on-capital framework to institutional clients, recently launched Measurisk.com, a Web-based risk outsourcing service.

Rich Tanenbaum, the bank's ex-head of derivatives research, in 1990 formed Savvysoft, a New York-based company that sells spreadsheet tools for derivatives pricing and risk analysis.

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