BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side pricing/valuation service—Quantifi

Quantifi takes this year’s award for the best buy-side pricing/valuation service, besting last year’s winner, TriOptima. Quantifi’s valuation service—which covers multiple assets, including fixed income, foreign exchange, credit, equities and commodities—provides valuations built on best practices as well as the flexibility for clients to set limits within the embedded models. The platform covers illiquid instruments and markets and ensures consistency from the front to the back office.

Rohan Douglas, the firm’s CEO and founder, says demand has been strong for services like Quantifi’s in order to cover a wider array of assets as the buy side has been hit with fee pressures and stronger competition in the market. “One of the things we did was restructure how we support our clients and focus on improving our connection to understand their needs,” Douglas says. “We want to preempt what is coming for them, so we’ve really increased the number of assets we have.”

According to Douglas, Quantifi has seen increased interest broadly across the fixed-income market, including fixed-income exchange-traded funds where the firm is seeing a lot of growth.

Quantifi’s pricing and valuation service can be accessed through a simple API so that clients can register models and data. The offering is modular, reflecting Quantifi’s strategy where it wants to provide scalable offerings to its range of clients. This includes making the platform and its real-time information available through the cloud, making it easier for clients to scale up or down. 

Douglas notes that Quantifi is also looking at additional opportunities to use technology, including more use-cases involving data as more assets and markets would need to be covered. “What we’re looking to do on the pricing and valuation side is to add more assets. We’re doing a lot with technology, to bring cloud, artificial intelligence and big data to our clients, but we really want to add coverage for more of the assets they want to enter,” he says.