BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side portfolio analysis tool—Quantifi

Flexible services in which asset managers and asset owners can analyze their portfolios alongside big datasets have become paramount as these investors look to make their investment strategies stand out among the competition. This year, the Quantifi platform has fit the bill, breaking a two-year streak held by Style Analytics.

This flexibility comes from the firm’s new data science platform that Quantifi began integrating into its portfolio analysis tool this year, says Rohan Douglas, founder and CEO of Quantifi. As a whole, the platform aims to make the process of report generation and data analysis easier and faster by normalizing data and leveraging the capabilities of third-party business intelligence tools such as Power BI and Tableau.

Douglas says he’s noticed a growing trend among buy-side firms looking for the ability to analyze and aggregate data from multiple sources. 

“Our focus today on the data science side is the ability to better manage, integrate, and analyze data,” Douglas says. Analysis capabilities include back-testing, strategy testing, and integrating multiple datasets from a variety of customers’ chosen providers. 

A vital counterpart to Quantifi’s data strategy is its work with the public cloud. A move to bring the portfolio analysis service onto a cloud-native infrastructure is already underway. 

Choosing cloud platform Microsoft Azure was a “natural fit” for the firm because of its existing Microsoft tech stack. Because the firm was already using the standard Microsoft suite of products, it provided a cost benefit relative to other platforms, Douglas says.

He adds that assets like cloud, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are finding homes outside the front office in areas such as risk management. As a result, Quantifi is releasing a new version of its real-time risk solution within the portfolio analysis tool. 

“Clients have said that they want their infrastructure to be as simple as possible, and that means fewer systems,” Douglas says.