Best Research Provider: BlueMatrix

In past years, many of these awards were taken home by a small number of the largest data providers. This year—reflecting today’s diverse financial information ecosystem—there are some inaugural recipients, including the winner of the Best Research Provider award, BlueMatrix.

BlueMatrix’s position in the market is neutral, and it follows the founders’ vision for the equitable exchange of investment insights, connecting asset and wealth managers with close to 1,000 research firms across more than 50 countries. 

“When we started in 1999, there was a need to automate the production of research, which was cumbersome and labor-intensive. Sending research was manual and was done with a different interface for each aggregator,” says Patricia Horotan, co-founder of BlueMatrix. “Our initial clients were tier two and investment banks, and boutique and independent research firms, and we helped these smaller firms compete with the bulge-bracket players. They could write the research and distribute it just as fast but spend less money doing this, and this is how we grew.”

BlueMatrix provides a suite of services and tools for the publication, dissemination, consumption and evaluation of investment insights. Reports are automatically formatted for preselected outputs such as PDF or HTML5, which can be custom-designed to showcase a company’s brand, and simultaneously distributed via email to aggregated research vendors and internal libraries for browser and mobile accessibility. Distribution has been built into the process through the platform’s customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities or via integration with a client’s preferred CRM system, and users can protect their intellectual property through controlled distribution that restricts accessibility and forwarding on a case-by-case basis, while showing readers’ identities. 

BlueMatrix completes the feedback loop with real-time readership data that analysts can use to drive future research. The built-in analytics module features an interactive dashboard with granular insights and trends about who is reading the research, who is disengaged, and the most popular analysts, reports and regions. 

Regulation such as the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), which requires research to be priced separately from execution, has boosted the use of BlueMatrix’s platform, Horotan says. “Buy-side firms have to show investors what they are consuming. They want to track and lock down the consumption of research and can use our platform to do this. On the sell side, Mifid II has fueled a more competitive environment, and our distribution and readership—plus the ability to use our readership data to help quantify the value of their research—has become more of a must-have than a nice-to-have for sell-side and niche research providers.” 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners