US analytics vendor Quantifi has signed up its first Dubai based client. Emirates Bank has taken Quantifi XL as a front office tool for pricing and analysing structured credit products. Quantifi XL is designed to provide access to pricing and risk analysis of credit products from within Excel, and is targeted at banks, hedge funds, asset management firms and insurance companies.
According to Markus Fiala, head of structured credit at Emirates Bank, says Quantifi XL was chosen for its support for a wide range of credit products. “We are very impressed with the level of support we receive from Quantifi, both now and throughout the evaluation process,” he says. “The product is extremely comprehensive and flexible, and the pricing models are fast and accurate.”
Rohan Douglas, Quantifi CEO, hopes this win will position the company to grow its presence in the United Arab Emirates and other countries across the Middle East.
The Emirates deal follows Quantifi’s win in November 2006 with Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg (LBBW) in Germany, which took Quantifi XL in its structured credit and fund derivatives area. Harald Muller, director of structured credit and fund derivatives at LBBW, said of its choice of the Quantifi tool: “We chose Quantifi because of their depth of coverage and the speed, accuracy and flexibility of their pricing models.”
In June Quantifi opened an office in London to beef up its European focus, hiring John Peck, ex of FT Interactive Data, Telerate and Dun & Bradstreet as head of European sales, with a brief to expand the client base across Europe and the Middle East (Reference Data Review, October 2006).
Quantifi’s approach is to be data agnostic – accommodating whatever choice of data suppliers its clients have made – but it has built an auto-mated interface to Markit, provider of credit derivatives data, to facilitate the process of populating curve and index data into its applications, speeding up the construction of underlying credit curves.
