Waters Rankings 2020: Best Data Analytics Provider—Quantifi

For the last two years, the award for best data analytics provider went to S&P Global Market Intelligence with its Capital IQ platform. This year, though, New York-based Quantifi has claimed the crown.   

The firm has analytics tools that help clients with problems such as the ongoing Libor transition and the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). Rohan Douglas, CEO at Quantifi, says that for requirements like FRTB, which is scheduled to take effect in 2022, requires the ability to run sensitivities and also be able to calculate wrong-way risk.

“That requires more sophisticated analytics,” he says. “Many people do not have that level of analysis available to them; even some of the largest banks don’t have the ability to be able to calculate wrong-way risk in a reasonable fashion.”

Quantifi integrates analytics into all of its enterprise offerings so clients can access it in different ways. “We integrate our analytics into the trading infrastructure and into the risk management structure that we provide, that is one way,” Douglas says. “We also provide the analytics as a library where it can be called through programming APIs and can be integrated with any system. So we have integrated it with third-party systems like Calypso or Murex.”

Over the past year, Douglas says the firm has been busy looking to apply some outside concepts in data science to finance, including taking ideas for big tech providers like Google and Amazon. “What that gives for clients is much better management of data, and much more flexible ways of analyzing that data,” Douglas says. “At the end [we are] really analyzing and reporting on some better ways of doing reporting like business intelligence tools and better ways of doing analysis on very large datasets; that is one big part of what we have rolled out of here.”