Vontobel Taps QuantHouse Data for Asia Push

Swiss private bank Vontobel Group is planning to expand the data it sources from data and trading technology vendor QuantHouse, a part of S&P Capital IQ, to include data from Asian markets in support of the bank's expansion of its structured products business into the region.

Vontobel first implemented QuantHouse's ultra-low-latency QuantFeed consolidated datafeed service -- which captures raw data, performs micro-second decoding and delivers normalized data through a single API -- in November last year, to receive feeds from the SIX Swiss Exchange, and has since expanded its relationship with the vendor to include data from markets where it is a direct member, including NYSE Euronext's European markets and BATS Chi-X Europe, before recently integrating market data from Bloomberg, covering 20,000 different instruments that the bank sources on a request-reply mechanism, says Markus Diener, head of IT at Vontobel.

"We need both Bloomberg and exchange data, because we get only the flow of markets where we are a member and not for all the other markets like [those in] North America. These markets are not in our specific business scope, but nevertheless we need prices for around 20,000 different instruments," Diener says.

Over the past two months, Vontobel has expanded its structured products business into Asia following predictions of low growth opportunities in Germany and Switzerland, and expects to start connecting to data from Asian markets via QuantHouse in the next six months, Diener says. "In the short term, we need to learn more about the Asian markets and the products they are used to, but from the spring or summer of next year, we will need to be partnering with a reliable network in Asia-Pac, and that's going to be QuantHouse," he says.

QuantHouse's feed handlers standardize the structure of the data before it is distributed to trading applications in the bank, and "that way our trading systems don't need to know all the specialties of the different marketplaces. [They] only [need to] know QuantHouse feeds," Diener adds.

‘Leading' the Charge
Separately, QuantHouse has recently launched an initiative dubbed Leading in a Time of Change in collaboration with European datacenter and hosting provider Interxion, London-based capital markets consultancy GreySpark Partners and TMX Atrium, the network and connectivity arm of Canadian exchange group TMX.

The vendors are collaborating to provide consulting services aimed primarily at banks, which are invited to explain their technology and market data challenges to "experts" representing the vendors and then receive insight based on the experiences these vendors have gained in working with clients confronting similar situations, says Stéphane Leroy, global head of sales and marketing at QuantHouse.

For example, the work that QuantHouse has been doing with Vontobel, principally around deploying new technology and integrating that with existing legacy infrastructure, provides knowledge that can potentially be passed on via the initiative, Leroy adds.

"In a very short time there has been a big change in the combination of things the banking sector has to understand, digest and act on -- such as regulation, cost optimization, and the technology gap between human-based trading to program-based trading... so we have launched this initiative to pass on the experience we have in helping the banking sector go through these changes," Leroy says.