Buy-Side Technology Awards: Best Data Provider to the Buy Side—RIMES Technologies

RIMES Technologies, this year’s winner of the best data provider to the buy side, has, since its founding in 1996, exhibited unwavering focus on the provision of clean, complete and wide-ranging data to the buy side. RIMES, along with Cadis and BI-SAM, the other two specialist vendors that together make up an impressive “threesome” that has accounted for no fewer than 16 awards in five years, has built its buy-side success on the back of its two-pronged product offering: the RIMES Benchmark Data Service (BDS) and the RIMES Desktop, both of which are powered by the firm’s proprietary technology, built to handle over 500 databases from 150 data vendors.

The RIMES BDS, the product responsible for RIMES’ win in the best implementation category in his year’s awards (see page 73), allows the middle and back offices to outsource their entire index-data workflow, improving the quality, speed and reliability of managing multiple benchmarks. BDS is a fully managed service, designed to reduce the unseen costs and operational risk of in-house index data management. The recently upgraded RIMES Desktop provides front-office access to more than 500 databases covering all asset classes with a single, intuitive interface via a secure internet connection. The data can inform portfolio management and valuation, fund administration and custodial services, technical analysis, trading operations, risk management and compliance, and fundamental research.

RIMES is, like Cadis and BI-SAM, fanatical about its client service, a quality that has stood it in good stead, and which has helped the New York-based firm win this category for the past four consecutive years. The closeness of the relationships RIMES has with its clients is best illustrated by Al Ferrari, the firm’s head of marketing, providing the names and contact details of 19 of the firm’s clients in accordance with the BST Awards terms and conditions, when just three would have sufficed. That list reads like a global buy-side “who’s who," containing some of the most well-known names in our industry. And while submitting 19 names is impressive, it very definitely does not guarantee you a win in this perennially competitive category. But what it does do is illustrate how eager its clients are to sing the praises of RIMES’ service, a quality that all successful technology vendors need to have when serving the buy side. —VBA