BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Risk Management Product—Axioma

Axioma wins this year’s best buy-side risk management category, replacing last year’s winner, Numerix. The New York-based company last won the award in 2016.

Over the past year, Axioma has continued to seek ways to scale up its services and find new ways to deliver its products to its buy-side and sell-side clients. 

One of its most notable updates to its risk suite is its new cloud-based environment, axiomaBlue, which it unveiled in October this year. Ian Lumb, Axioma’s global head of risk, says the new cloud-based offering will help clients adjust to the level of service they need. “Being cloud-based has given us the elasticity to address clients’ needs,” Lumb says. “Instead of forcing companies to conform to a rigid technology stack, we are able to adjust our workflows and solutions to meet their unique requirements. Our new open API (application programming interface) infrastructure, which is part of axiomaBlue, helps us develop that further and to interface with other best-of-breed solutions that will benefit our clients.”

AxiomaBlue offers additional analytics through the use of machine-learning models and a marketplace where clients can access a range of third-party services, enabling them to customize their platforms. It is currently offered with Axioma’s interface-first risk solution, although more additional functions within the risk management suite will be added shortly. 

Many of the new updates to Axioma’s suite of risk products will involve multi-asset class data, which, Lumb says, is one of the firm’s focuses, given that it has expertise in factor investing. Axioma is also looking to improve and broaden its asset coverage with the possibly of including securitized debt products. 

Lumb says the enhancements Axioma has made to its risk management platform have attracted the attention of larger clients. These updates and other enhancements on the horizon are being driven by client demand, according to Lumb, especially now that the asset management industry is experiencing mounting cost and efficiency pressures. “There is a lot of consolidation of asset managers, which has made them think about the legacy infrastructures they have—it’s put pressure on them in terms of their budgets as well as efficiency,” Lumb says. “Many clients want to have consistent data between the front and middle office to increase efficiency.”

Lumb adds that these concerns are why Axioma is looking at means to provide easier links between its many solutions so that downloading data or analytics will ensure consistent information and quick access.