Institutional Risk Intelligence

Generating risk results is only half the battle.

Understanding how models and analytics were configured, what the results mean, and generating new scenarios based on narratives is just as important. Cortex makes all of this self-evident for anyone, regardless of role, so risk intelligence is shared and persisted throughout the organization.

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Position Model Analytic Result Explanation
Every number is traceable from the position that produced it to the explanation you can stand behind.
The cost of a question

Today, every question has a cost

Ask the risk team why a number moved, and you pay in delay, opacity, and disruption — so you ask less than you should.

Without Cortex
  • You ask "why did VaR jump?" and wait — hours, sometimes days.
  • The answer is a narrative. You can't see the work behind it, so you trust it.
  • Asking pulls an expert off running the system, so you ask less than you should.
  • If they leave, the understanding leaves with them.
With Cortex
  • You ask in plain language — or just say it out loud — and get an answer in seconds.
  • Every answer cites the evidence and the computation. Verify it; you don't have to trust it.
  • The agent operates Cortex itself. No one's work is interrupted — so ask everything.
  • The reasoning is persisted in the system, not locked in one person's head.
The platform

Risk Ontology, Analytics, and Data Lineage

The three capabilities Cortex leads with — one governed system, grounded in your own configuration and computed results.

Risk Ontology

The governed model layer.
  • Mapping rules, model types, and position filters
  • Field mappings, overrides, and statistics settings
  • Risk logic that is testable and auditable — not buried in tribal knowledge

Analytics

Agile analytics over the RiskON API.
  • Stress & sensitivities, sigma-classified ALARM / WATCH / CLEAR
  • Scenario builder — narrative or deterministic shocks
  • Tail-risk navigation and five correlation methods
  • A Python reporting layer for deep, large-dataset exploration

Data Lineage

Every number, traceable to its source.
  • Which mapping rule and input/output model produced a result
  • Answers that cite the governing evidence and the computation
  • Explainable by construction — trust it, then check it
How it works

One question, one governed path

A portfolio manager describes a market stress they're worried about. Cortex turns it into a governed factor plan — and explains the result down to the security.

1

Describe the scenario

"I'm worried about a sharp equity sell-off with rates backing up and credit spreads widening."

Plain language, the way you'd actually say it — no factor codes, no RiskON expertise required.

2

Cortex builds a deterministic factor plan

It maps your narrative onto the factor ladders your engine actually supports — equity, rates, credit, commodity, volatility — and selects specific, available shifts: EQ −40%, IR +300bp, CS +300bp. It flags honest gaps too, like when no clean historical anchor exists for the regime you described.

3

Approve or edit

You see exactly which shifts and historical anchors it chose, and why. Run it as-is, dial the severity up or down, add a factor, or save it as a reusable scenario — you stay in control of the stress that gets applied.

4

Run — and explain down to the security

Results come back immediately. Then drill into any position to see precisely how it repriced under the shocks — a security-level Explain that turns a P&L number into a defensible answer, not a black box.

See Cortex

Ask in plain language. Cortex does the work.

From a sentence to a governed result — and it shows you how it got there.

Narrative Scenario Builder

"Stagflation: equities fall, rates and commodities surge." Cortex turns a sentence into a deterministic stress plan — the right risk factors, shift sizes, and historical anchors — and shows its reasoning before anything runs.

  • Approve, edit, run against the live portfolio, or save
  • Flags gaps honestly — e.g. when no clean historical anchor exists
  • No RiskON or RiskServer expertise required
Cortex Narrative Scenario Builder turning a plain-English stagflation prompt into a deterministic stress plan with a Review & Run step
Cortex Voice Assistant taking a spoken request and navigating the app to the Tail Risk view it just opened

Voice Assistant — ask, and it operates Cortex for you

Say it or type it: "Run a tail-risk decomposition and show me where the loss concentrates." The agent navigates Cortex, runs the analysis, and narrates each step — so you never have to know which module, configuration, or query to reach for.

  • Drives the whole platform — analytics, lineage, stress, scenarios
  • Explains what it's doing in plain language as it goes
  • The clearest expression of "intelligence for anyone, regardless of role"
Speak your language

Ask in your language — not the risk system's

A portfolio manager thinks in theses, not mapping rules. You shouldn't have to translate your view for an analyst — or wait while someone else does.

You
"What happens to my book if the yen carry trade unwinds and rates back up?"
Cortex
Proposes a deterministic plan you can see — the factor shocks, the historical anchors, and the hierarchy it will run — then returns the P&L with the evidence behind every number.

The translation is on screen, not outsourced. Approve it, correct it, and move on — in the time it takes to ask.

Who it's for

And the team behind the numbers

The people who defend, configure, and run the risk process every day — each with a different challenge, the same answer.

Risk Manager
The challenge
You defend reporting you didn't personally compute. A challenge you can't answer on the spot reads as not owning your own numbers.
With Cortex
Every figure carries its lineage and computation — defend any number in the meeting, with evidence, not a day later.
Risk Analyst
The challenge
You configure the models and become the human runbook — every "why did this change?" interrupts the work that's actually your job.
With Cortex
Your configuration explains itself. Others self-serve the "why," and the reasoning behind every choice lives in the system, not your head.
Risk Operations
The challenge
You own the daily SLA and triage breaks against the clock — is it the data, the config, or the model?
With Cortex
Cortex pinpoints where a break entered the pipeline, with evidence — triage in minutes, and the run stays on time.
How it stays honest

AI as the interface — not the source of truth

The deterministic engine produces the numbers. Cortex explains them — and no single model's mistake reaches you unchecked.

Route

A fast layer sends each question to the right documents and data — no keyword guessing.

Reason

A reasoning layer reads the full source material and computed results to produce the answer.

Validate

A separate, independent layer verifies every claim against the evidence before it reaches you.

Long context, not retrieval guesswork
Cortex loads whole documents into context rather than pulling fragments from a vector store — and it's model-agnostic, so providers can change without changing the governed architecture.
Adopt with confidence

Get value from AI — without the usual risk

Most firms want AI value but stall on cost uncertainty and internal resistance. Cortex is built to remove both.

Predictable cost

Cortex is deterministic-first. Analytics, lineage, and stress run with no LLM call at all — a model is invoked only when reasoning or explanation is actually needed. You're never billed for tokens you don't use, and cost tracks value, not clicks.

No black box

The engine is deterministic and unchanged — AI explains results, it never computes them. Every answer is cited to the evidence and independently validated. Nothing reaches the desk on faith.

Augments your team — doesn't replace it

Cortex frees analysts from being the human runbook and lets your experts scale — it codifies their judgment, it doesn't overrule it. The people who were the bottleneck become the authors.

Your control, no lock-in

Runs inside your security boundary — on-prem or private cloud. You decide what the AI can see. Model-agnostic, so you're never locked to a single provider.

Built for change

Change becomes a governed, testable event

Risk environments never hold still — drift is inevitable. The only choice is whether it's invisible or governed. Cortex makes each change a testable event, not a fragile workaround or a long investigation.

Model changes

New model versions, new instrument coverage, vendor updates, and evolving internal conventions.

Statistics changes

VaR horizon and confidence, stress definitions, volatility and correlation methods, proxies, and overrides.

Portfolio structure

New hierarchies, sleeves, strategies, benchmarks, legal entities, aggregation views, and reporting cuts.

Organizational change

Role churn and ownership shifts — without losing the institutional knowledge that explains the book.

How it's built — and how it grows

Built by the same loop you'll use to extend it

Out of the box, Cortex runs itself — no consulting engagement to operate it. When it needs to grow, it grows through the same governed loop that built it.

Proven, not promised

Describe a change in plain language; an agent builds it, runs the full regression suite, and it ships only when it passes. That loop has built Cortex itself for months — the product is the proof.

Extend it by asking

Request a change, new functionality, or a fix — by voice or chat. It's built and regression-tested under that same loop, then delivered as a version you test first. Nothing reaches production until you accept it.

Governed so it can't break production

The build agent runs under a fixed set of rules and skills that no one can change — not you, not us in the moment, not the agent itself. The deterministic core stays protected, and Red Swan maintains that governance so extending Cortex never adds risk.

Why Red Swan

Practitioner-led, codified into systems

We've been separating signal from noise in institutional portfolio risk since before the Global Financial Crisis.

2008
Solving these problems since
18 yrs
Implementing & supporting risk analytics
$20B+
Multi-strategy books served

Red Swan has implemented, managed, and supported risk analytics and models for sophisticated hedge funds for 18 years. Our partners previously led research and analytics teams and institutional risk-aggregation businesses. Cortex embodies that practitioner experience and expertise — and persists your institutional risk intelligence so it doesn't walk out the door when people do.

Leadership

The practitioners behind Cortex

Experience implementing institutional risk — codified into the system, not dependent on staying in the room.

Founder
John Matwey

Implemented, managed, and supported risk analytics and models at Red Swan for 18 years. Prior experience supporting roughly 200 hedge-fund clients on an institutional risk platform.

LinkedIn
Partner
Jim van Putten

Lead risk developer for risk-integration implementations and modeling at Red Swan for 15 years. Portfolio and risk management since 1988.

LinkedIn
Partner / CTO
Philip Jacob

Partner and CTO at Red Swan for over 7 years. Former Head of Research, Analytics & Data at a leading institutional risk firm for over a decade, and lead developer of the analytics and reporting layer.

LinkedIn
FAQ

The questions risk teams ask first

Scope, governance, integration, and deployment — the boundaries that make this durable in production.

Scope & fit
What is Cortex?
A governed AI layer over your risk stack that turns mapping rules, models, market data, and computed results into explainable, evidence-cited answers — usable across the desk, not only by specialists.
Does it replace our risk system?
No. It makes your risk environment explainable, testable, and maintainable under change. The deterministic engine remains the source of truth.
Do we need a commercial risk-system license?
Yes — a risk-system license and Web Services credentials for advanced aggregation and automation.
Can non-specialists use it safely?
Yes — that's the point. A PM or analyst asks in plain language and gets an evidence-cited answer. The computations stay deterministic and unchanged; Cortex explains results rather than producing them, and an independent layer validates every claim. Accessibility goes up; reliability does not go down.
Governance & AI safety
How do you prevent hallucination?
Every answer runs through an independent validation layer that checks each claim against the governing evidence before you see it. Cortex works only from approved sources — your configuration, policies, and computed results — never open-ended generation.
What is auditable?
Every output cites the governing evidence and the computation that produced it — so a non-specialist can trust it and a specialist can check it.
Are there AI model options?
Cortex is model-agnostic: it loads full source material into context rather than depending on any single provider's retrieval, so providers can change without changing the governed architecture.
How do you avoid drift in answers?
New model releases are validated against benchmark testing as part of the license, so answers stay consistent. The validation layer is itself a separate model.
Integration & APIs
Can we still use Snowflake, SQL Server, or Databricks?
Yes. RiskON can populate those databases with published results via API, so downstream systems align to the final, remediated output.
Can we control it programmatically?
Yes. All functionality is accessible via APIs, including Python libraries built to work directly with very large vector datasets without reducing precision.
Do you support very large datasets?
Yes — full simulated return vectors are worked directly, without downsampling, proxying, or forced intermediate exports.
What API standard is used?
An OpenAPI (OAS) REST contract — endpoints, parameters, and responses in a machine-readable format, explorable through Swagger UI.
Deployment, security & terms
Where does it run?
Client-controlled: fully on-prem or inside your private secure cloud. The core platform runs within your defined security boundary.
Does any data leave our environment?
The core platform runs within your boundary. AI usage is governed separately; if you choose an external model provider, the scope of any data shared is explicitly defined by policy and workflow controls.
How flexible is deployment?
The deployment model is selectable; the architecture is fixed and intentionally opinionated, which is what keeps it reliable and supportable. Customization applies to risk logic and outputs — not infrastructure or data contracts.
What are the commercial terms?
An annual recurring license that includes platform maintenance and updates.
In practice
A $20B multi-strategy firm had used a leading commercial risk system for years, but the pace of new strategies and security types outgrew the original implementation — sophisticated instruments like OTC derivative hedges weren't being modeled, and simple proxy rules weren't enough. Within a year, mapping rules were implemented across all security types and the upstream gaps were closed. Today the firm has a firmer grasp of portfolio risk, agile control over model configuration, and full transparency into the process.
Governed Deterministic Explainable
Next step

A short scoping conversation

If your environment has drift, complexity, or key-person dependency, the next step is a scoped discussion: what's changing, what breaks, and what "governed" must mean in your operating model.