BST Awards 2020: Best data provider to the buy side—Rimes Technologies

The award for best data provider to the buy side isn’t just about the breadth, depth, quality, and timeliness of data—it’s about overall service and reliability. That’s where winner Rimes Technologies excelled during 2020. Amid exchange closures and unprecedented market volatility, Rimes’ aim during this time was simply to ensure that its clients didn’t need to worry about their data, even as chaos raged around them. “Rebalancing events were postponed or canceled altogether, so if a country is due to enter or leave an index and the event doesn’t happen, our clients benefit from our systematic checks that ensure index portfolios are accurately presented on the platform,” says Rhys Chapman, global head of client services at Rimes. “Every rebalance was pushed in March, with the exception of a few, which were caught. … Those planned rebalances that got pushed happened later in the year, sometimes out of the [index] vendor’s usual rebalance cycle, or even in the middle of the month. Simply put, if you use Rimes, you won’t miss the rebalance.”

Similar challenges arose around the volatility throwing up false positives, for which the vendor adjusted its checks and tolerances, and the impact of negative market sentiment on cutting or cancelling dividends, which requires corrections to the data on those expected dividends, which are already in firms’ systems. “Many such changes occurring close together result in spikes of exceptions to manage. We were seeing two to three times the [normal] volume of exceptions and corrections for most of H1,” Chapman says. “Remember, this was happening while firms had reduced capacity to operate as members of their staff were getting acquainted with Zoom, etc. Rimes continued to hit KPIs during these times, though it took a fair bit of organization and hard work across all of our teams.”

The vendor’s focus for the foreseeable future is to continue to support new ways of working at clients and support business as usual, even when business remains far from normal. “Most of our 350-plus clients are predominantly working ‘out of office’ and we have been releasing normally commercially chargeable services to our clients to ensure their business continues to be successful,” says Andrew Barnett, global head of product strategy at Rimes. “It’s important that we continue to be an extension of our clients’ operating model.”