Modern Back Office Workflows for Pricing and Reference Data: The Power that Price Challenges Provide in Transparency and Intelligence

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.

The Power of Price Challenges – Transparency & Intelligence 

QUODD has partnered with S&P Global for seven years, delivering the most transparent fixed income pricing available. Through the integration of S&P Global (formerly IHS Markit) Price Viewer Tool into the QX Digital Platform, users gain single sign-on access to a comprehensive suite of pricing, reference data, schedules, and Terms and Conditions, whether accessed through QX or via our APIs. This user-friendly functionality provides valuable insights into Corporate and Sovereign Bonds, Municipal Bonds, and Securitized Products, addressing the crucial need for increased transparency in response to regulatory and accounting requirements.

QX Digital and the Price Viewer application provide users with simplified access to timely information to better understand the market data inputs that go into the creation of an evaluation. Evaluations have many factors to determine such as modeling the instruments, pricing inputs, data enrichment, market collaboration and guidelines. 

A key of this transparency is the direct access to the S&P Support Team and Bond Evaluators. Users benefit from the ability to submit Price Challenges or New Coverage Requests directly on the platform, and typically receive a response within 24 hours. This transparency extends to explanations of pricing determinations or adjustments made in response to price challenges. Pricing for new issues begins once all required reference data is collected, with clear and timely communication.

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.