What are the latest innovations in financial technology?
Technology is transforming the financial service industry. New, disruptive technology including AI, Big Data, Cloud, microservices, Modern CPUs, In-Memory Computing, Lambda Architectures, and blockchain have the potential to radically change how firms operate. Quantifi is on the forefront of these changes and our advanced architecture and significant investment in R&D provides our clients with the latest innovations and a significant competitive advantage.
Can you explain some of those trends you mentioned?
One of the most significant trends across the financial markets is AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI holds tremendous promise and is becoming increasingly useful in predicting the behaviour of financial instruments. It is already being applied across a wide range of applications including asset management, insurance, and trading. A key component of AI is data. Without big data, AI would not be where it is today, as it is this type of data that makes it possible to train AI. A number of the trends I’ve highlighted are associated with big data, performance, scalability and efficiency.
The challenge with big data is that it is larger, less structured and more complex data that cannot be managed with traditional methods. There is a rapidly evolving landscape of new tools and approaches designed to process and analyse complex data to gain new investment insights and improve efficiencies. These increasingly large sets of data will, in turn, require a higher level of processing. One of these new approaches is in-memory computing which enables large sets of data to be analysed thousands of times faster than traditional approaches. The ability to analyse big data at unparalleled speeds, allows individuals to respond to market events with greater speed and efficiency. Another approach to big data management is Lambda architecture. This is a unified, scalable and fault-tolerant data-processing architecture designed to handle huge quantities of data in an efficient manner by splitting it into both batch and real-time processing.
Modern CPUs using parallelism to increasing the number of cores and adding support for single instruction, multi data (SIMD) architecture is another relevant trend. To take advantage of all opportunities of parallelism, software needs to be designed from the ground up to support multi-threading and vectorization to deliver higher performance.
Can you tell us more about the key technologies used by Quantifi?
A key focus has been to make Quantifi more open and flexible by separating out our architecture to microservices. Components within a microservices architecture are loosely coupled, making them more flexible, reliable and responsive to change. With a microservices architecture we have the unique ability to vertically and horizontally scale from small, single desktop deployments to fully integrated enterprise deployments.
High performance is crucial to our clients as they need fast, accurate answers to make the right decisions in rapidly changing markets. Quantifi is built using advanced technology and Lambda Architecture design patterns that leverage modern CPUs and Cloud Computing to deliver scalable, ultra-high performance for pricing and monitoring of risk in real-time.
With demand for greater transparency firms are looking for self-serve business intelligence tools that support risk management and data visualization. Our real-time dashboard and reporting engine is based on an in-memory datamart which leverages technology from the open-source Big Data community. Transparency is achieved with interactive drill-down, slicing and aggregation across all data.
Our clients are always interested in ways to improve the efficiency of their business and operating models. Quantifi comes with a powerful framework for implementing durable, customizable workflow services that automate business processes like workflow management and simplify operations. The workflow engine has an intuitive GUI and provides simple interfacing with external systems along with full control over security and permissions.
APIs and plugins are another core component of our technology. Clients have access to the tools and APIs used by Quantifi to allow them to customise and extend our solution in ways that are supportable and scalable. Our language agnostic APIs provide an open platform that sets a new standard in extendibility, flexibility and customisation. Clients also benefit from unparalleled flexibility of our ETL layer. Our next-generation ETL layer provides rapid and robust bi-directional interfacing with external data sources using a wide variety of formats. This flexibility translates into a significantly faster and more robust integration.
One final but important point is that we recognise that every client is different which is why we allow our functionality to be consumed in ways most suited to their unique business requirements. Support for Microsoft Windows, Linux and MacOS provides greater flexibility and scalability for deployment and is an integral part of our cloud strategy.
What differentiates Quantifi’s technology from other solution providers?
Firms can struggle with the inflexibility and high maintenance cost of legacy systems built on technology that is no longer fit for purpose. New technology, like Quantifi, brings significant benefits in usability, flexibility, scalability, and performance whilst providing the tools needed to support new regulatory and business requirements at a lower cost.
Quantifi has been a leader in financial technology since its inception. Our forward-thinking approach and pace of innovation allows us to align our technology strategy with emerging technologies. This approach has a significant impact on our ability to rapidly turn around enhancements and new features. Unlike systems saddled with years of legacy code, our solutions are designed from the ground up using the latest, most advanced technology and design patterns to ensure optimal performance. This approach has given our clients significant advantages in performance, scalability, usability, and ease of support.
We understand the challenges our clients face and through a sustained investment in R&D, we are able to adopt new technologies that provide higher performance, more functionality, lower total cost of ownership, lower operational risk, and more accurate results.