BST Awards 2021: Best buy-side risk management product—Qontigo  

OVERVIEW

Axioma Risk is a cloud-based enterprise risk management and performance attribution system for equities, fixed income and alternative investments, offering analytics and data in a single platform.  

Typical user-firms: Asset managers, hedge funds and asset owners, from the front office to middle-office risk managers and back-office reporting and research staff.  

Qontigo continues to expand its analytic capabilities in the European markets as well as its index capabilities in the US. It has grown appreciably over the last 12 months, with almost 600 employees globally. 

WHAT’S NEW

In 2020, Qontigo integrated its Axioma Fixed Income Risk Model into Axioma Risk. The model is built to support systematic fixed-income investing, such as smart beta and style investing, with a consistent factor framework for portfolio construction, risk management and performance attribution. The firm launched the Axioma Fixed Income Spread Curves, providing sub-sovereign, corporate and emerging market spread and yield term structures in a standalone, flat file format. The curves are also available in Axioma Risk for credit risk modeling and risk/performance decomposition. It also launched its Macro Projection Model in 2021, which is now available in Axioma Risk for macro risk decomposition, macro factor scenario analysis and stress testing.

Qontigo rearchitected and productized its data infrastructure, with the goal of improving its legacy data ingestion and processing pipelines. The new infrastructure is entirely cloud-based, building on cloud vendor PaaS offerings to enable fast processing and elastic scalability. The firm is building on this foundation a computing infrastructure for derived data processes such as yield curve generation and risk model computation. 

Qontigo hired Ping Jiang, a portfolio construction and risk management specialist, as its global head of analytics solutions, and developed its Sustainable Investment Advisory Board and a Sustainable Investing Think Tank team.  

WHAT’S TO COME

Sustainability is a large focus for Qontigo and a key pillar of Qontigo’s values and solutions. Through its open architecture approach, Qontigo offers a curated selection of sustainability data partners to help clients meet ESG goals. Some partners include Sustainalytics, Clarity AI, and ISS ESG. 

Qontigo will continue to enhance Axioma Risk to offer additional asset classes and ESG integration capabilities.

WHY THEY WON

Qontigo won this category for the continued investments made to Axioma Risk, its multi-asset cloud-based enterprise risk management and performance attribution system. Qontigo rearchitected and productized its data infrastructure to improve legacy data ingestion and processing in the past year. The cloud-based infrastructure now allows for fast processing and elastic scalability pipelines.