Refinitiv’s QA Direct Platform Commits to the Cloud

Refinitiv – formerly the Financial and Risk business of Thomson Reuters – is launching its quantitative analytics platform, QA Direct, on the cloud through Microsoft Azure.

It is Refinitiv’s second partnership with Microsoft, following an announcement in October that Refinitiv financial and markets data would be integrated with Microsoft applications and services, such as Excel, MSN Money and Bing.

QA Direct in the Cloud builds upon the existing QA Direct platform, offering a cloud-based option to manage, maintain and integrate quantitative analysis and investment data.

“QA Direct is a database of databases,” says Austin Burkett, Refinitiv’s global head of quant and feeds, adding that it delivers a range of global market and referential data in one standardized database with a unified symbology. “It’s an industry-leading product that concords 40 or 50 Refinitiv content sets with scores of third-party content sets across a singular identifier. That is what saves our quantitative investment customers and other users of QA Direct a tremendous amount of time—they don’t have to do this concordance work.”

He says the data is delivered straight into the tables in the database, which customers can then cross-reference and query with an identifier called the QA ID. “This, by our estimate, saves our customers 40 to 80 percent of their time in managing and wrangling this data, time they’d rather be spending developing investment processes.”

Burkett stresses that the service delivers content in an entirely new, cloud-native fashion. “This is not a ‘lift and shift’ solution. This is something that engages transnational replication in the azure cloud. The data simply flows like water,” he says.

A cloud-based service also means faster onboarding. Before the partnership, QA Direct was an “on-premise product,” Burkett says, requiring Refinitiv “to build up a database and deliver it to the customer, which is not always an easy process, depending on how big the database is.”

What used to take two or three weeks now takes a few days, according to Janet Lewis, vice president of financial services at Microsoft.

“[QA Direct on the Cloud] is delivered through processes that we’ve developed in conjunction with Microsoft that enable the spinning up of a database much more rapidly than before,” Burkett says. “The benefit is that customers are up and running, discovering investment returns and alpha, and testing their models more rapidly, which is what they want to be doing at an increasing rate.”

The cloud-based service is an add-on to QA Direct’s regular direct license, with standard pricing. However,  for smaller customers, he says, “we try to work with them to satisfy their needs. The benefit here is that for a license fee, we are providing a high level of service from which we expect the customers to derive a great deal of value.”

Burkett says the launch is a response to customer demand for a cloud-based QA data platform, which led Refinitiv to have discussions with multiple providers. Refinitiv’s database is in SQL and “Microsoft is an SQL company,” he adds. “We started devising a solution that can get all this content into a server that is maintained by Refinitiv, thereby saving the customer a tremendous amount of time. Microsoft has been a pleasure to work with, not just from a technical standpoint, but from a business development standpoint. They’ve really helped us envisage this solution for our customers.”

Future partnerships are a possibility, he says, and could involve expanding some of QA Direct in the Cloud’s capabilities, layered-in analysis packages, or branching out into machine learning or artificial intelligence.

“Those are things that we could explore. I’m not saying we’re launching anything like that, but once you’re in the cloud in these environments, a tremendous number of options and opportunities open up,” Burkett says. He adds that Refinitiv is “cloud agnostic” and would also explore partnerships with other cloud providers.