BST Awards 2021: Best buy-side data analytics tool—RiskVal Financial Solutions
Product: RiskVal Pre-Trade Analytics (RVFI)
OVERVIEW
RiskVal combines Wall Street trading pragmatism with a data pool of relative-value metrics to identify trading opportunities across the G30 fixed-income spectrum.
Typical user-firms: RiskVal’s clients are traders and portfolio managers at top-tier banks, hedge funds and asset managers across the globe trading G30 fixed-income relative-value.
RiskVal is growing 2.5 times faster (+25%) this year compared to the average over the last five years.
Notable geographies of user growth include Asia (+75%), Australia (+300%) and Canada (+57%).
It onboarded additional SSAs (+138%), macro (+133%), and emerging markets (+133%) focused traders on the back of product enhancements.
“RiskVal is our platform of choice for analyzing the market. It helps us identify real-time trading opportunities with its suite of relative-value metrics and also lets us slice and dice large amounts of data any way we want. We especially like that it can automatically find us the best relative-value trades in our space. In addition to the functionality, the commitment of the RiskVal team to always having real-time customer support through [Bloomberg] IB chat and quick turnaround time on new features is why we’ve chosen RiskVal all these years.”
WHAT’S NEW
RiskVal enhanced the functionality of its automatic relative-value trade finder to better fit the needs of traders, and added new metrics to evaluate the best trades in the market. The firm made several enhancements to ensure its users are equipped with the necessary tools to trade in a post-Libor world. It implemented new derivatives pricing and curve construction methodologies to handle all the new market conventions and nuances. It also worked with market experts to enhance its analytics, most notably on global multi-asset strategies, emerging market derivatives, and agency/sovereigns, supranational and agencies (SSA) trading. RiskVal’s two new partnerships with Tradeweb and MTS enables traders to access live bid/ask prices, market depths and liquidity data in tandem with its relative-value analysis. RiskVal also built a new order management service that integrates with Tradeweb and MTS’ BondVision, allowing traders to submit trades directly to the trading venues from RiskVal, without having to re-enter these trades on the respective platforms.
WHAT’S TO COME
RiskVal is expanding its partnerships with Tradeweb and MTS to cover more products, including gilts, repo, SSAs, next-generation bonds and derivatives. It is expanding its analytics suite to allow clients to apply machine-learning techniques for their own custom analysis. It is also working on upgrading its GUI infrastructure, which will allow the firm to deliver a smoother user experience to its clients.
WHY THEY WON
RiskVal’s Pre-Trade Analytics tool identifies the optimal relative-value trades automatically. Following agreements to integrate live bid/ask prices, market depth and liquidity data from Tradeweb and MTS, RiskVal built its own OMS that integrates with its analytics and can execute directly on these platforms, and will expand the content it sources from each to cover more fixed-income and derivatives products and create more analytics.
“The main reason why RiskVal has stayed ahead of the curve for the past 20 years is because of our continuous partnership with traders and portfolio managers across all of Wall Street. We have created the most cutting-edge product on the market through constant communication with traders and portfolio managers and a weekly enhancement cycle that solves all their current challenges in real time. As a result, our data analytics are always evolving with the market.”
Zhendong Wan, COO, RiskVal
Only users who have a paid subscription or are part of a corporate subscription are able to print or copy content.
To access these options, along with all other subscription benefits, please contact info@waterstechnology.com or view our subscription options here: https://subscriptions.waterstechnology.com/subscribe
You are currently unable to print this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
You are currently unable to copy this content. Please contact info@waterstechnology.com to find out more.
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
As outlined in our terms and conditions, https://www.infopro-digital.com/terms-and-conditions/subscriptions/ (point 2.4), printing is limited to a single copy.
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
Copyright Infopro Digital Limited. All rights reserved.
You may share this content using our article tools. As outlined in our terms and conditions, https://www.infopro-digital.com/terms-and-conditions/subscriptions/ (clause 2.4), an Authorised User may only make one copy of the materials for their own personal use. You must also comply with the restrictions in clause 2.5.
If you would like to purchase additional rights please email info@waterstechnology.com
More on Awards & Rankings
Best private markets data provider—MSCI
MSCI’s Private Capital Transparency standardises manager‑reported and independent private‑asset data, linking private and public markets.
Most innovative market data project/initiative—firmfact
Firmfact automates market‑data contracts, invoices and entitlements for banks and asset managers. Its AI reads documents, matches invoices line‑by‑line and verifies licences with minimal keying.
Best market data newcomer (vendor or product)—Octaura
Octaura’s Insights Platform is an integrated market intelligence and analytics offering purpose-built for the leveraged loan market.
Best market data provider (broker)—Fenics Market Data & Analytics
FMD’s Broker Data service draws on BGC Group’s global brokerage operations to provide pricing, trade and order-flow information across FX, rates, fixed income, commodities and derivatives.
Best evaluated pricing service provider/vendor—Infront
Infront Quant supplies independent, cross‑asset valuations with a “white‑box approach”, offering level 1 and 2 transparency.
IMD & IRD Awards 2026 winner’s interview—Smartstream
Smartstream wins Best reference data managed service at the IMD & IRD Awards 2026
Best reference data integration vendor—Gresham
Gresham’s AI-native EDM Suite combines data from disparate sources and systems and provides user-firms with a single point of integration across the data life cycle.
Best ESG data initiative—Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s Impact and Allocation dataset provides investors with a consistent means of assessing how proceeds are being deployed and what outcomes issuers report.
