Speed is Currency in Financial Services | Dell (2024)

New Validated Design for HPC Can Provide a Competitive Advantage for FSIs

Financial services institutions (FSIs) are highly competitive, driven by the need to retain existing customers and attract new customers with better, more innovative customer experiences. This requires them to evaluate and act upon massive volumes of data and to do it better and faster than their competition. The new Dell Validated Design for HPC – Risk Assessment enables FSIs to compete more effectively by analyzing data faster to make speedier decisions that increase profits and reduce losses while minimizing risk.

Traditionally, high performance computing (HPC) has been used to solve a few big problems, but HPC workloads in FSI require numerous small calculations. The new Validated Design for HPC – Risk Assessment was designed to provide faster Monte Carlo simulations with greater efficiency by evaluating and testing millions of hypothetical scenarios using both historical and real-time data. This enables commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card payment processors, and insurance companies to see all the possible outcomes of their decisions and assess risk accordingly.

Examples of how the new solution can benefit financial services institutions include:

• • Faster Risk Assessment: For credit offer decisions, powerful HPC systems can manage more data, faster and make AI/ML models more predictive and accurate. HPC enables FSIs to accelerate credit risk assessment and make better-informed decisions on the creditworthiness of loan applicants, thus reducing losses.
  • Personalized Customer Experiences: HPC enables AI/ML algorithms to offer a modern, 1:1 customer experience. FSI organizations can individualize offers for new products by matching them to risk levels. Sophisticated ML algorithms can be used to analyze user behavior, demographic data and transaction activity to develop personalized offers.
  • Competitive Pricing and Product Development: FSIs can remain competitive by calibrating pricing for products and services to market conditions in real time.
  • Real-time Fraud Detection: According to recent research, every $1.00 of fraud loss now costs U.S. financial services firms $4.00, compared to $3.25 in 2019 and $3.64 in 2020. HPC-driven Al systems for fraud detection are now table stakes for FSIs. HPC enables AI to detect suspicious behavior and anomalies in real-time. For example, payment-processing giant Mastercard has two billion cards in use in more than 210 countries and territories, processing 165 million transactions per hour, so it uses AI powered by HPC systems to stop fraud instantly without disrupting or delaying legitimate transactions.

Record-breaking Industry Benchmark Results

In October 2022, the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) announced that the Dell Validated Design for HPC – Risk Assessment outperformed all existing systems tested to date when tested against the financial services industry’s STAC-A2 Benchmark. The STAC-A2 Benchmark is the industry standard for testing technology stacks used for compute-intensive analytic workloads involved in pricing and risk management. It is such a well-known and well-understood benchmark in financial services that many FSIs now use it as a proxy for judging how well a technology stack would do with other financial HPC workloads.

• • The Dell Validated Design provided 1.23X better space efficiency¹: The data centers used for financial marketplaces are very costly and limited in capacity. Space in data centers is an issue so firms look for how much of their needed workload can get completed while still staying space efficient. Dell’s system did more risk and volatility calculations per cubic inch of data center space than any system on record.
  • The Dell Validated Design provided 2.25X² and 1.15X³ faster cold time calculations: Warm time versus cold time in HPC calculations can be compared to how fast a car can accelerate with a warm engine versus a cold engine. Warm time means that the system is already loaded with the data and the problem and is ready to go. Cold time includes getting the system ready.

Cold time calculations are especially important to firms with compute grids and clusters where the compute gets used for many different tasks. They want systems that allow them to set up a new task and compute quickly. There are two different problem sizes here – a baseline calculation size that most financial firms deal with and a large calculation size many must scale to accommodate. Dell set the record in the cold time of both.

The Fastest, Most Efficient Solution Also Offers Fast, Easy Deployment

Dell Technologies Validated Designs are tested and proven configurations, designed from the start to dynamically fit needs based on specific use cases. These integrated solutions have been stringently tested and documented by Dell Technologies experts and their partners to reduce risk and increase reliability and to shorten deployment timelines – reducing, or in some cases eliminating, the time it takes to design, test and integrate components.The Dell Validated Design for HPC – Risk Assessment has been designed and tested by HPC engineers to run data-intensive, sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations on powerful HPC systems that include NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Dell PowerEdge servers paired with high-performance storage.

For more information on the Dell Validated Design for HPC – Risk Assessment, read the solution brief or visit Dell’s HPC solutions page.

¹ STAC‑A2.β2.HPORTFOLIO.SPACE_EFF. Source: STAC Report, CUDA 11.6 with 4x NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB GPUs in a Dell PowerEdge XE8545 Server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, October 2022.

² 2STAC‑A2.β2.GREEKS.TIME.COLD. Source: STAC Report, CUDA 11.6 with 4x NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB GPUs in a PowerEdge XE8545 Server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, October 2022.

³ 3STAC‑A2.β2.GREEKS.10‑100k‑1260TIME. COLD. Source: STAC Report, CUDA 11.6 with 4x NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40GB GPUs in a PowerEdge XE8545 Server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3, October 2022.