Modern Back Office Workflows for Pricing and Reference Data: The Power of Hard to Price Assets and Illiquid Securities

 One of the main areas QUODD has focused on in the past few years is addressing how firms can better serve their middle-and-back-office employees with access to vital market data. What we’ve observed is that the back and middle office professionals don’t always require the bells and whistles that come with the offerings from legacy providers. But what they do need and want is the modern, reliable applications to keep up with today’s demands delivered by technology partners that truly understand their unique business needs. 

The industry trend is rapidly moving towards data-on-demand that involves customized delivery models, coupled with a user-specific experience that works better with the workflow needs of middle-and-back-office employees, who are often either fully or partially remote and need immediate fingertip access.

At QUODD, we built our QX Digital Platform to bring this modern experience to our valued clients across the buy and sell sides; spanning operational workflows within banking & trust, asset management, asset servicing (custody/clearing/fund admin), wealth tech solutions, accounting platforms, capital markets, fintech trading/analytics and other segments. In this series of posts, we aim to highlight a number of the modern workflows we’ve built over the last year to help our clients achieve better operational efficiency and scale in the back office.

QX Digital provides on-demand access to industry leading pricing data

High quality pricing for hard-to-price assets is critical for the back office of financial institutions to support accurate portfolio valuation, effective risk management, regulatory compliance, and transaction settlement.

Accurate pricing of hard-to-price assets is critical to back office operations of financial institutions. It ensures precise portfolio valuation, effective risk management, regulatory compliance, and transaction settlement.

The QX Digital Platform offers on-demand access to industry-leading pricing for a variety of complex assets, including securitized products, callable or puttable bonds, inflation-linked securities, and zero-coupon bonds.

Avoid regulatory non-compliance and reputational risks

Complex structures, high credit risks, and low market liquidity can pose challenges to accurate valuation of hard-to-price assets. Inaccurate data poses risks such as regulatory non-compliance and reputational damage.

The QX Platform provides a comprehensive range of crucial data points for accurately valuing these securities, including liquidity scores, Weighted Average Life (WAL), market value, yield to worst, ratings, and reference data.

Users can access data through various workflows, from ad-hoc lookups to programmatic integration into daily operations. Additionally, coverage requests and pricing challenges can be conveniently submitted via the platform.

Overall, the valuation of hard-to-price assets requires careful consideration of various factors, including cash flow characteristics, credit risk, market liquidity, and modeling assumptions. QUODD is excited to offer this high quality data to support your back office needs.

About QUODD’s QX Digital Platform 

QUODD built a fit-for-purpose digital platform that gives customers access to reliable and comprehensive market data functionality and content for middle and back-office workflows.

The QX Digital Platform delivers the highest quality, proven, reliable, and cost-effective source of comprehensive security pricing, reference data, and analytics across all asset classes, integrating best-of-breed content providers for funds, equities, and fixed income via a web-based market data portal. In 2023, QUODD tripled the number of companies using the QX Digital Platform.

Serving as a cornerstone of the QUODD market data suite of products and services, QX Digital Platform was built to help wealth management servicing firms to connect the workflows between the back to middle to front offices; empowering financial institutions with the operating efficiency and controls to most effectively support data management and client servicing needs.

QX Digital Platform is utilized as a primary or secondary source by leading institutions in the bank wealth management, trust, and retirement segments and/ or by their enabling technology platform providers that are continuing to grow as operations outsourcers.

The technology powering QX Digital Platform ingests, normalizes, and productizes best-of-breed sources of market data content for consumption with the lowest amount of friction.