QUODD, the market data on-demand provider, has upgraded its QX Digital Platform to incorporate comprehensive bond data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, reinforcing its end-of-day global pricing and reference data service for wealth management clients through its QX Automate API.
QUODD’s QX Digital Platform gives customers access to market data functionality and content for front, middle and back-office workflows. S&P Global Market Intelligence now supplies the Platform with independent pricing and liquidity data for bonds, offering advanced security look-up and query capabilities using pre-defined or custom templates. Transaction data analysed and aggregated to generate pricing content encompasses nearly three million corporate and sovereign bonds, municipal bonds, and securitised products.
Integrating S&P Global Market Intelligence’s bond pricing and reference data with global equities and funds through QUODD is designed to enhance the QX Digital Platform’s display capabilities and connectivity for downstream wealth management users. The integration allows users to optimise their market data consumption, maximise their market data spend, reduce costs without compromising quality, and improve workflow efficiency. It supports daily pricing, reference data, and corporate actions while automating data usage entitlements for customised workflows.
“We have incorporated access to S&P pricing and reference data into our extensive content catalogue, which is a mix of proprietary and third-party data sets,” Bob Ward, CEO of QUODD, explains to TradingTech Insight. “This collectively amounts to 150 data sources and 250 billion data points in our data lake. We have made all this data available via several access points. Users can access this data as individual datasets via several communication methods (QX Marketplace), they can access digitally online and view and extract on demand (QX Digital), and now they can programmatically access multi-asset class data into third-party applications (QX Automate).”
QUODD has now signed numerous clients across multiple market segments with similar workflow concerns. The key drivers are timeliness, simplicity, and easy accessibility, as Ward outlines in the following use cases:
New issues research – New debt instruments are released into the market daily, and firms need pertinent terms and conditions to classify them correctly in their systems. The QX Digital Platform is tied into the real-time S&P bond reference data API to retrieve those details as soon as S&P does.
New asset setup – Banks price assets based on the issues that their clients hold. “A current customer told us this week that they set up 850 new assets in their system in June alone,” says Ward. “They are constantly accessing QX Automate to pull the data they need to properly set up those securities in their system based on asset type, sometimes multiple times a day. This gives them the timing and flexibility to retrieve data at any time to meet their client’s pricing needs.”
Price challenges – The Price Challenge process via the QX Digital Platform is supported by the integrated S&P Price Viewer tool, as Ward explains: “This tool gives our customers direct access to the S&P bond evaluators for price challenges. As bond pricing varies by provider, prices can differ, and customers need to confirm the most accurate evaluation. Price challenges are affirmed or updated usually within a few hours. The S&P pricing methodologies are transparent to all of our customers.”
Security master maintenance – “Most of our customers use QX not only for pricing but for global security master maintenance using our Corporate Actions solutions,” says Ward. “Many parameters can be set, such as Voluntary vs. Mandatory Date parameters, based on Effective Date or Announcement Date, or the ability to hone in on specific events that affect things like reorganizations, which affect shares and price. Maintenance tasks like identifier changes, name changes, M&A, etc., are all important in maintaining a security master.”
In addition, the platform has embedded proprietary calculators such as an Accrual & Amortization tool that provides the requisite buy & sell tickets on certain fixed income instruments, leveraging content from S&P to meet and exceed the functionality available in the legacy terminals.
Modern technologies and delivery models have been integrated into the QX Digital Platform to meet the new need for data on demand, and these innovations keep QUODD ahead of its competitors, says Ward. “Most providers today have layers and silos of technology, leading to increased inefficiencies and lower quality. QUODD is designed from the ground up for the future, and with our cloud-native platform, we can deliver our content into customisable client workflows that are turnkey, scalable, and cost-effective. Building from this platform allows us to meet customer needs today with very low switching costs while opening new options for even more advanced integrations as their digital strategy continues to evolve.”
Ward states that the two defining characteristics of the technology are a cloud-native platform that is purpose-built to power the full breadth of market data apps and APIs and the ability for companies to manage their preferred consumption model and frequency of data updates. “By virtue of technology reducing the friction of integrating and onboarding new sources of data on a self-service, on-demand, and connected basis, the QX Automate module delivers a superior experience, enabling customisation and integration at the same time; and because we are cloud-native with a modern tech stack, we can build faster and respond to customer requirements with more agility and transparency,” he says.
In terms of market data spend, Ward points out that under QUODD’s pricing model, clients only get charged for what they use and the frequency of that use. “This pricing approach, combined with a single integration point for a client’s entire security master, coupled with the improved workflow for the employees (no more swivel chairing), provides a very good value for our clients,” he says.
Looking ahead, QUODD has a number of customer-driven projects in the pipeline, including leveraging AI to help build third-party adapters at a quicker pace, and using AI to expand the company’s proprietary data sets.
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