Valuelink Adds Ex-Paladyne Systems Exec Simmonds as New Head of Sales

Data validation services vendor Valuelink has added ex-Paladyne Systems European regional director, David Simmonds, to its executive team as head of sales. In his new role, Simmonds will be responsible for spearheading the company’s strategic growth by identifying and maximising opportunities to deliver value to new and existing customers, says the vendor.

Simmonds was regional director at Paladyne, which is focused on the hedge funds sector, for a period of two years. Paladyne’s solution offering includes a fully hosted platform for hedge funds’ back office operations and, during his time at the vendor, Simmonds was focused on hirings and firings, establishing industry partnership agreements and generating new sales.

Valuelink is hopeful that Simmonds will bring this buy side knowledge to bear on his new role, along with his contacts in the industry for new sales opportunities. The vendor is pushing its solution offering as an alternative to in-house maintenance of the data validation function, thus incurring lower costs. It is counting on the economic pressures being exerted on firms in the current environment to encourage them to sign up for its solution.

Data is collected from multiple vendors, specialist sources, brokers, market makers and websites and processed through a six stage validation routine to ensure consistency and accuracy, says Simmonds. Each client specifies their own tolerances and validation checks, as well as the formats in which they want to receive the enriched data.

“In today’s environment every bank and investment manager is under severe pressure to ensure the accuracy of their net asset value (NAV) calculation. Valuelink provide their clients with a service that enhances the daily collection of prices and corporate actions at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a data validation function,” contends Simmonds.

Earlier this year, Valuelink added SIX Telekurs’ Intraday Pricing Service (IPS) as a data provider for its PriceValidation solution. The vendor can now cleanse the data from SIX Telekurs’ real-time Market Data Feed (MDF) against a number of feeds from different data suppliers and internal sources and provide it as an optional feed for its PriceValidation clients.