Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Data Analytics Tool—S3 Partners

The speed of data creation, delivery, consumption and processing has been growing at an exponential rate within the capital markets in recent years as regulators, clients and financial services firms themselves seek greater transparency around numerous business processes, which means data analytics platforms must be able to support and satisfy those demands. 

S3’s collateral and treasury management platform Blacklight places an emphasis on time efficiencies, productivity and information control, reducing the time necessary to manage prime, swap and custodial data by three to seven hours per day, according to the vendor. Its breadth of functionality covers securities financing, commissions, cash management, over-the-counter (OTC) collateral, counterparty agreements/terms/risk, prime broker/repo/swap margin, custody/counterparty relationships, balance-sheet efficiency, and accurate “what if” real options analysis (ROA). 

The goal of the Blacklight platform is to improve buy-side relationships through the provision of data-driven analytics that in turn improve trading decisions, although there is also an increasing regulatory burden in the post-trade space, particularly in Europe with the looming Mifid II regulation, set to come into force in January 2018. S3 Partners has, in response to these twin drivers, continued to evolve its Blacklight platform throughout the last 12 months through the addition of a full reporting suite, digitized document library, a security finance dashboard, multi-asset class exposure analytics, enhanced visualization tools, and new wallet and performance measurement analytics, among others.

Earlier this year the company announced a partnership with Bloomberg, which now sees the data giant publish Blacklight’s market standard financing data on its 300,000 terminals worldwide, while in June it expanded that alliance by making its Blacklight Apps Crowding Kit (aka Black Apps), which provides analytics on crowded trades, available via Bloomberg’s App Portal. REDI Global Technologies, now under the ownership of Thomson Reuters, announced in mid-November that it would also be providing clients with access to the Blacklight platform. 

S3’s collateral and treasury management platform Blacklight places an emphasis on time efficiencies, productivity and information control, reducing the time necessary to manage prime, swap and custodial data by three to seven hours per day.