Sell-Side Technology Awards 2020: Best Sell-Side Analytics Product—3Forge

It used to be that analytics products were specific to an asset class, instrument or function, with individual providers specializing in each area. But not so for AMI, the performance platform from New York-based software vendor 3Forge, which can be used to monitor anything from trading and markets activity to systems support issues.

3Forge is no stranger to the Sell-Side Technology Awards, having won the best sell-side web-based development environment category in last year’s awards, although this is its first time taking home best sell-side analytics product award.

In its first decade of existence, 3Forge has amassed 59 clients, including three of the top five global banks, and comprising a range of use-cases and client profiles. According to a recent study of its clients performed by the vendor, 50% of users are in high-touch, mission-critical roles supporting trade flow, such as sales traders, portfolio traders, and operational and support staff. “These are people in roles where they see an order come in and have to react in a split second, or people in operations roles who spot an anomaly and need to react quickly,” says 3Forge founder and CTO, Robert Cooke. Another 25% use it for high-level analytics, such as monitoring markets and understanding trading activity throughout the day, while developers account for the remaining 25%. “When they are building or doing quality assurance on a system, they can use our dashboard to speed that up,” Cooke adds.

Key to AMI’s ability to support so many different use-cases is that the platform is data agnostic and can connect to many types of systems, from static to streaming data sources, simply by dragging and dropping content and capabilities to quickly create analytics dashboards to serve their needs. “We think the long-term goal of front-ends is to deliver a single, consolidated dashboard where you do all your work, instead of, for example, a sales trader constantly moving—and copying-and-pasting data—between maybe a dozen separate applications,” Cooke says. “Now, we continue to focus on making dashboards easier to build and diagnose as data becomes more complex, to deliver better instrumentation so you can understand how calculations are being derived, and—for the upcoming period—improving our horizontal scalability to handle massive amounts of data.”

Another ongoing effort for the firm is expanding its client base into other segments of the market. “At this point, we are focused on the sell side, where the need for speed is obvious. But we are definitely seeing more traction on the buy side, and we are talking to some large asset managers that are interested in our advanced analytics,” Cooke says.