An increased focus on the European markets is paying dividends for US based Quantifi, provider of modelling, pricing tools and risk analysis for credit derivatives, as it picks up its first German banking client. In June the company opened a new London office and hired John Peck – ex of FT Interactive Data, Telerate and Dun & Bradstreet, as head of European sales, reporting to Rohan Douglas, Quantifi founder and CEO.
Peck’s brief as sales director is to provide local support for Quantifi’s existing European clients as well as expanding its client base across Europe and the Middle East. The vendor is targeting banks, hedge funds, asset management firms and insurance companies. “In particular we see interest from participants who need independent pricing along with the ability to enter the market quickly,” he says. “Traditional asset managers, insurance companies and regional banks have been particularly active over the last year with a number of them kicking off derivatives projects to review their requirements.”
Quantifi’s European presence has been strongest in the UK, but it sees opportunities with institutions across the continent. The German win is important because a range of institutions in that market are either already involved in or looking at structured credit, Peck says. “This is also leading us to other markets such as Dublin where some institutions have established their structured credit areas. Clearly we will look to develop our business in the other main markets across Europe such as France.”
While Quantifi says it is “data agnostic” – “whatever choice of data supplier our client has made, we will try to assist them in integrating the required content into our products” – it has built an automated interface to Markit, the dominant provider of credit derivatives data, to facilitate the process of populating curve and index data into its applications, speeding up the process of constructing the underlying credit curves.
