BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side pricing/valuation service—Quantifi

For the second year in a row, Quantifi sweeps up the award for best buy-side pricing and valuation service.

Clients of Quantifi’s valuation library run the gamut of buy-side shops, global banks, brokers, clearing members, and corporates. The service supports multiple assets including fixed income, foreign exchange, credit, equities, and commodities.

Rohan Douglas, founder and CEO of Quantifi, says the trend he has seen among clients this year has been the urge to expand the range of assets they trade, in addition to the ongoing pursuit to reduce costs. There are a number of methods that can reduce costs for the buy side, but Douglas says the most prevalent has been system automation. 

“Customers want systems that are more automated and are easier to maintain so that they can reduce the number of staff they need in the non-revenue generating operation side of the business,” he says.

Quantifi Toolkit, the pricing and valuation service, can be accessed through a simple API for clients to register models and data without database programming. It is designed to support multiple models for individual products and provide a simple interface. The architecture behind the model is modular, allowing clients to scale deployments from desktops to global enterprise data centers.

Douglas says he’s noticed rising interest across the fixed-income market, including in fixed-income exchange-traded funds (ETFs). In the last year, the firm has worked to include more detailed constituent-level analytics on fixed-income ETFs. 

“There’s been a constant drive from clients to expand the asset coverage that we are working on,” he says. 

As a result of those requests, he says that Quantifi will have new products coming out based on fixed-income ETFs.