Sell-Side Technology Awards 2019: Best Alliance or Partnership—QuantHouse and ARQA Technologies

The winner of the best alliance or partnership category in this year’s Sell-Side Technology awards goes to QuantHouse and ARQA Technologies, on the back of the two firms marrying their trading solutions and order management system (OMS). The partnership, initially announced in June 2018, is available as a fully managed service in Europe, providing clients with access to more than 150 equity and derivatives markets. Roman Anokhin, director at ARQA, says the solution allows clients to use a complex product without needing to invest time and money in its implementation and set up of the connectivity. “The combination of rich functionality and [the] benefits of managed services gives clients access to better technology in a scalable way, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional architectures,” he says.

Through the partnership, QuantHouse feeds ARQA’s QUIK OMS with normalized, global market data, while at the same time, QUIK OMS is hosted at QuantHouse’s datacenter in London. This allows clients to use QUIK OMS as a service and simplifies connectivity to exchanges and execution brokers that are members of QuantHouse’s application programming interface (API) ecosystem. As the solution is fully managed, QuantHouse and ARQA maintain the platform, leaving clients to focus on value-generating activities. While both companies have a background and expertise in the implementation of complex projects involving market data and trading software, Anokhin says launching an integrated datacenter required mutual effort. 

Stephane Leroy, business co-founder and chief revenue officer at QuantHouse, says the partnership with ARQA has allowed QuantHouse to develop its technology to better cater to the needs of sell-side institutions due to their shared expertise. “This market niche also has great opportunities for further growth,” Leroy says. “It meets the complex needs of clients, allowing them to save their own resources, while connecting to a ready-made ecosystem. We see it as a real win–win between our companies and a very valuable offering for our clients, who can take advantage of economies of scale, a simplified onboarding and implementation process, faster project completion, and access to over 150 market data feeds,” he adds. Moving forward, Anokhin says ARQA is constantly updating QUIK OMS to satisfy clients’ functionality requirements, internal business analysis, and regulatory changes. Meanwhile, Leroy says QuantHouse is continuing to onboard new providers to its API ecosystem, which means that clients will have access to not only equities and derivatives market data and execution capabilities, but also to a pool of foreign-exchange and fixed-income trading venues.