SimCorp introduces AI-powered stress testing for investment managers 

London — April 15, 2026 — SimCorp, a global leader in financial technology, today introduced a new AI-powered stress testing capability within Axioma Risk, allowing investment managers to focus on insights and decision-making for their portfolios instead of spending valuable time and specialized expertise on manual configuration.

The new enhancement employs natural language for stress testing, a core tool used by portfolio and risk managers to understand how their investment portfolios may perform under extreme but plausible market conditions.

This type of stress test allows investment teams to focus on identifying vulnerabilities, interpreting risk, and acting on identified risks that can be mitigated. It also helps provide deeper insight into tail risk arising from changes to interest rate expectations, currency moves, inflation, commodity price changes, or geopolitical events.

“Accelerating stress testing workflows can be game changer for investment teams,” said Ian Lumb, Head of Risk & Performance Product Management, SimCorp. “When stress test configuration takes hours, risk teams cannot respond to events in real time. We are removing that bottleneck with AI-powered stress testing.”

With this new enhancement, users of Axioma Risk — SimCorp’s cloud-native, multi-asset risk management system — can use natural language to design customized stress scenarios, identify relevant historical precedents, propose realistic factor shocks, and assess scenario plausibility. This removes some of the most time-intensive steps in the process, allowing teams to focus their expertise on interpretation and decision-making rather than configuration.

The AI-powered stress testing capability allows users to:

• Configure stress scenarios faster: Move from multistep manual workflows to AI-assisted setup. This often reduces the configuration of complex portfolio stress tests from hours to seconds.
• Translate high-level concerns into financial shocks: Describe macroeconomic or geopolitical risks in plain language, while the system suggests relevant market shocks and time series. For example, a client might ask: “I'm concerned what might happen from a continued escalation in the middle east. What are some potential or likely shocks to financial time series that I should consider for my portfolio?”
• Assess scenario plausibility: Use advanced statistical metrics to evaluate whether stress test scenarios are realistic or overly volatile scenarios. For example, a user might ask: “What is the plausibility of my transitive stress tests?" and then follow it up with "Which historical periods should I use to calibrate the historical covariance matrix to maximize the plausibility of my stress test?"
• Iterate quickly: Modify scenarios, adjust parameters, and rerun analyses without spreadsheets, data exports, or manual coordination across teams.
• Leverage AI to simplify complex tasks, but retain calculation governance and audit: Regulators are increasingly concerned about audit trail of decisions and analytics where AI is involved. This initiative keeps human-in-the-loop approvals, calculation with the analytic foundation layer - all fully auditable and explainable.

SimCorp integrates AI capabilities across its investment management platform, SimCorp One, helping clients automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and manage increasingly complex portfolios. To learn more or request a demo of AI-powered stress testing in Axioma Risk, visit simcorp.com/axioma or access the Axioma by SimCorp research reports.