BST Awards 2021: Best buy-side data analytics tool—RiskVal Financial Solutions

OVERVIEW

RiskVal combines Wall Street trading pragmatism with a data pool of relative-value metrics to identify trading opportunities across the G30 fixed-income spectrum.

Typical user-firms: RiskVal’s clients are traders and portfolio managers at top-tier banks, hedge funds and asset managers across the globe trading G30 fixed-income relative-value.

RiskVal is growing 2.5 times faster (+25%) this year compared to the average over the last five years. 

Notable geographies of user growth include Asia (+75%), Australia (+300%) and Canada (+57%). 

It onboarded additional SSAs (+138%), macro (+133%), and emerging markets (+133%) focused traders on the back of product enhancements.

WHAT’S NEW

RiskVal enhanced the functionality of its automatic relative-value trade finder to better fit the needs of traders, and added new metrics to evaluate the best trades in the market. The firm made several enhancements to ensure its users are equipped with the necessary tools to trade in a post-Libor world. It implemented new derivatives pricing and curve construction methodologies to handle all the new market conventions and nuances. It also worked with market experts to enhance its analytics, most notably on global multi-asset strategies, emerging market derivatives, and agency/sovereigns, supranational and agencies (SSA) trading. RiskVal’s two new partnerships with Tradeweb and MTS enables traders to access live bid/ask prices, market depths and liquidity data in tandem with its relative-value analysis. RiskVal also built a new order management service that integrates with Tradeweb and MTS’ BondVision, allowing traders to submit trades directly to the trading venues from RiskVal, without having to re-enter these trades on the respective platforms. 

WHAT’S TO COME 

RiskVal is expanding its partnerships with Tradeweb and MTS to cover more products, including gilts, repo, SSAs, next-generation bonds and derivatives. It is expanding its analytics suite to allow clients to apply machine-learning techniques for their own custom analysis. It is also working on upgrading its GUI infrastructure, which will allow the firm to deliver a smoother user experience to its clients.

WHY THEY WON

RiskVal’s Pre-Trade Analytics tool identifies the optimal relative-value trades automatically. Following agreements to integrate live bid/ask prices, market depth and liquidity data from Tradeweb and MTS, RiskVal built its own OMS that integrates with its analytics and can execute directly on these platforms, and will expand the content it sources from each to cover more fixed-income and derivatives products and create more analytics.