About Norma, the founders and the story

Purpose

Why Norma exists

Every trade an institution prices, every limit it checks, every capital number it reports rests on calculations that were too slow to run when the decision was made. The desk quotes on an estimate. Risk sees exposure a day late. Capital is managed by rule of thumb because the full set of sensitivities never finished in time. The models are fine; the engines around them were built for a world where overnight was good enough. Norma exists so that the cost and the risk of a trade are known when the decision is taken, by everyone who needs to know, from the same numbers.

How

One engine, one set of models and market data, fast enough to run on demand. Built by people who spent almost two decades making exactly these calculations work for the largest banks.

What

Pre-trade XVA impact, regulatory capital, counterparty exposure and market risk, on one platform, in the client's own tenancy or hosted, through analytics dashboards or the API.

History

The story

Where it starts

Norma, from the Latin for rule and measure, exists so that the numbers a decision rests on are computed to a standard, and in time to matter. Norma's roots are in university research on accelerating compute-intensive calculations, then almost two decades of pricing and risk engines for the largest banks: centralised XVA, CVA sensitivities for hedging, FRTB internal models, real-time counterparty risk. Every time, the models were fine. The engines were built for an overnight window the business had outgrown.

The decision

A bank builds its risk engine around the overnight batch it inherits. We spent almost two decades making those engines faster, at many of the largest banks, and the lesson never changed: faster, yes. Live, never. Live has to be designed in from the start. Norma was founded to build that engine, once, as a product, with nothing to inherit.

Why XVA first

XVA is the hardest calculation in the risk stack: every trade, every counterparty, thousands of market scenarios, valued together over the life of the book. An engine that does XVA live has solved pricing, exposure and capital on the way. Jon Gregory, author of The xVA Challenge, has been involved from the ground up.

Where it goes

One engine now runs pricing, capital, exposure and market risk, validated against reference implementations, fast enough to answer while the decision is still open.

Leadership

Hicham Lahlou

Co-founder

More than twenty years in high-performance computing and capital markets software. Founder of Xcelerit, which he took from a university spin-off to a supplier to Fortune Global 500 institutions. Before that, a research fellow in high-performance computing at Trinity College Dublin, and a software engineer on space programmes at the European spaceport in French Guiana. MSc in Electrical Engineering, INSA Lyon. Leads Norma's business development.

Jörg Lotze

Co-founder

More than twenty-five years building front-office and risk systems for global investment banks and scientific computing. Co-founder of Xcelerit. Architect of enterprise-grade platforms from design through deployment and support, with an insistence on performance and production quality. Leads distributed engineering teams. Diplom-Ingenieur in Computer Engineering, Technische Universität Ilmenau; PhD in Communications Engineering, Trinity College Dublin. Leads Norma's engineering.

Jon Gregory

Advisor

Independent expert in counterparty credit risk and related aspects, including CVA, FVA, collateral, regulatory capital, initial margin and central clearing, and author of The xVA Challenge. Consultant to the World Bank Group, senior advisor to Solum Financial Derivatives Advisory and faculty member for the Certificate in Quantitative Finance. PhD from Cambridge University; worked extensively on credit risk at Barclays Capital, BNP Paribas and Citigroup. Widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the credit area, he runs bespoke training courses and workshops for financial institutions worldwide. Has worked with Norma from the ground up.

No institution should make a decision
on yesterday’s numbers.

Why Norma exists

How

What