Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Overall Technology Provider for 2016—UBS Delta

This year, UBS Delta joins a distinguished list of past winners of this category, which includes Advent Software (now part of SS&C Technologies), Charles River Development, Eze Software Group, Fidessa, Algorithmics (now part of IBM), and last year’s recipient, RIMES Technologies. This is UBS Delta’s second category win of this year’s BST Awards, after it emerged top of the best broker-supplied tool/technology category, although it also featured prominently in the final reckoning in three other categories: best buy-side risk management initiative over the last 12 months, best buy-side performance measurement and attribution product—both won by BISAM—and best buy-side risk/portfolio analytics product, won by Axioma.

The UBS Delta platform, responsible for delivering a steady clip of wins for the Swiss bank over the years—two wins in 2015, one in 2014, one in 2012 and one in 2011—is a portfolio analysis and risk management offering that sits within the firm’s UBS Neo suite, a collection of client-facing applications supporting commodities, foreign exchange and fixed-income trading. UBS has made no bones about the fact that it sees Bloomberg’s August 2016 acquisition of Barclays POINT as part of its acquisition of Barclays Risk Analytics and Index Solutions, as an opportunity to make further inroads into the buy side. In the short term, it continues to focus on a proposition around a hosted platform with short implementation times and expertise in fixed-income analytics, risk, and performance and attribution. The firm is a strong proponent of the school of thought that risk and performance should be analyzed simultaneously, using the same core data, the same market drivers and uniform classifications, which, it believes, results in more consistent, intuitive and robust risk and performance outputs. Combining both risk and performance functions in a single platform means that data input can be streamlined and more time can be devoted to analyzing data rather than cleaning it. 

Clearly, as evidenced by this win, UBS is onto a winning strategy with its Delta offering, a strategy likely to deliver it to the winners’ circle in future BST Awards in the broker-supplied tool category and possibly others too. 

Clearly, as evidenced by this win, UBS is onto a winning strategy with its Delta offering, a strategy likely to deliver it to the winners’ circle in future BST Awards in the broker-supplied tool category and possibly others too.