BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side data analytics tool—Advantage Data

As demand on buy-side firms to extract maximum value from data has grown over the years, the competition to be the best performer in the category of data analytics tools has intensified. Last year, the award went to FactSet, and the year before to Trade Informatics. This year’s winner, Advantage Data, is a vendor with high ambitions. 

René Robert, president at Advantage Data, says his firm’s mission is to be a high-quality, low-cost alternative to Bloomberg. But, he says, there are very few offerings in the marketplace that can replicate the functionality of a Bloomberg Terminal.

“We very much pride ourselves in replicating the kind of performance, quality, and plethora of data that was historically only found in a Bloomberg Terminal. Today, that can be had for a fraction of the cost via Advantage Data,” Robert says. 

A major announcement from the firm this year comprised the September launch of Private Bond Advantage, a pricing and analytics tool designed for the private-bond marketplace. 

“[We have] figured out a way, through highly proprietary means, to price thousands and thousands of private securities that are otherwise unknown to the marketplace,” he says. 

Looking at the year ahead, Robert says his firm plans to increase the scale of its platform to service more clients and securities. 

“There are some updates that we will be doing that improve performance,” Robert says. “These updates will be noticeable to clients, but they will really extend our capacity to process enormous amounts of data in a very short amount of time. We are going to be rewriting some of our capabilities to increase the scalability of our platform to service more clients and more securities. That will be a big push for us.”