BST Awards 2019: Best integrated middle-office platform—Quantifi

Quantifi wins the best integrated middle-office platform category in this year’s BST Awards, a new category for 2019. It also emerged top in the best buy-side pricing/valuation service (page 53) and product of the year (page 30) categories. 

Quantifi’s middle-office platform is part of the firm’s front-to-back-office portfolio management system, featuring trade capture, real-time position management and profit and loss functionality. Users can also manage their regulatory reporting, risk management and market valuations functions via the single dashboard.

Rohan Douglas, CEO and founder of Quantifi, says a major focus for the firm is exploring new technologies in order to reduce costs and increase efficiencies for its clients. “Generally, the approach is to allow clients to do more for less and allow them to leverage their employees as much as possible, so we’re adding artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and software automation, designed not to replace employees but to allow them to do a lot more work,” he explains. “To be clear, the AI project is still really early days in production. It’s a project where we’re partnering with some of the larger software companies like Microsoft and Intel. We’re looking at different ways of leveraging AI to achieve that goal and provide a system that’s easy to use and monitor, so that it can pick up problems in advance and help diagnose them.”

Douglas adds that clients want to do more with a single system and so part of what drives the firm’s innovation focuses on providing that experience. According to Douglas, Quantifi is in the process of expanding its instrument coverage and automating certain middle-office tasks in order to meet that demand.

Another area of focus for the platform is to provide insight into complex portfolios, especially as interest across the buy-side in fixed income and credit has risen. Douglas says that’s the reason why the platform was made to be scalable and customizable, as buy-side firms adjust the assets in their portfolios in order to generate more alpha.