The objective of CIPRATECH (Capital Investment Probabilistic Risk Assessment TECHnology) is the transfer of risk evaluation technologies developed for the Nuclear Engineering and industrial sector to the capital investment sector.

The project is co-financed by the European Commission Directorate General XIII in the frame of the 4th Framework Innovation Program.
 
The technology transfer opportunity is offered by existing software technologies developed and copyrighted by EC-Joint Research Centre (JRC)  and by the U.K. Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in the engineering/energy sector, and inspired by the interest shown in these technologies by a number of financial partners who are now participating in the Cipratech Consortium.

The aim is to make available better software tools for investors and traders to evaluate Value At Risk (VAR) for venture capital initiatives and for mutual and pension funds management.

The main advantage of Cipratech is the capability to evaluate the global probabilistic risk of a capital investment by considering four different risk aspects at the same time.

    - Marketing analysis
    - Financial analysis
    - Technical analysis
    - Company analysis

In addition the program allows to make a marketing analysis of a specific sector, or to perform a financial analysis of an investment, or to analyze a technology or product as individual stand-alone evaluations, or as a combination of only two or three of the modules.

CIPRATECH has been developed by an European Consortium composed by six partners:

Defence Evaluation and Research Agency is the largest European research organization which has wide experience in the application of advanced computational techniques in the government and defense field.

ICCREA is a financial Holding formed by approx.600 Italian small banks, with 2,800 local branches serving the SME sector.

CIPRATECH grew out of the need to devote sufficient capital investment to the creation and development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and New Technology Based Firms (NTBF), which are known to be the driving forces of economical and occupational growth in the E.U. 

Within the European Union, public and private financial resources are available, however their utilization to bring a new technology or product from R&D to the production and commercialization stage suffers from capital risk evaluation difficulties. Methodologies exist and are currently used by capital risk companies for the assessment of both the viability and the risk associated with the commercial exploitation of opportunities in new technologies or products. Nevertheless, these methodologies are still very uncertain which makes it often very difficult to quantify the risk involved in the development, production and commercialization of new high-tech products . 

This is due to the fact that the investing organizations are reluctant to take unquantified risks and usually prefer to direct available funds towards safer and more traditional portfolios (bonds and other low-risk fixed return investments). Changing this trend is of paramount importance in order to push traditional investments towards more productive use. Ideally, once a realistic quantification of the risk is achieved, it should be possible to attract venture capitals as well as pensions and mutual funds to invest part of their portfolio to finance SMEs, NTBFs and innovative products. This can only be achieved with the improvement and refinement of present methodologies and procedures used for capital investment risk evaluation. 

An area where Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) has been developed, validated and intensively used, is the nuclear energy industry. Its successful application in this industry has motivated the transfer of PRA methodology to other industrial sectors and now, with the CIPRATECH project, to the financial and capital investment sector.

To visit the Cipratech site click HERE