Overview of the Quintessence solution

1. Quintessence is the premier Investment Research Platform. This enterprise
solution facilitates all aspects of a fund managers’ investment and
research process.
 Surface ALL data within your investment and research process to
all stakeholders in the organisation
 Save expensive resource time by automating repetitive tasks.
 Minimise the turn-around time required to create new reports,
models and functionality required by the investment process.
 Seamlessly integrate all databases within your organisation.
 Warehouse and manage the organisations' intellectual property
and processes.

2. A persistent challenge facing the chief investment officer of a fund management company is
identifying the appropriate technological solution that rigidly structures the investment process and yet
allows the creative freedom required in the research process. Most CIO’s choose a combination of
disparate tools to solve this problem. These tools range from data providers such as Reuters®,
Bloomberg® and Factset®, specialised toolsets such as StatPro®, custom built data-warehouses and
inevitably Excel®. This consequently results in a potpourri platform that over time, unavoidably becomes
unmanageable and resource intensive.
Quintessence solves the challenge of providing a robust, structured and scalable platform to manage
the investment process that does not stifle the creative research process. This is enabled through the
following three key functional features:
• The Quintessence Integration Platform assimilates all data within the organisation. This middle
tier component ensures that all data, whether available in flat files or maintained and
managed in in-house or 3rd party databases is accessible through one interface.
• The Quintessence Presentation Layer allows users within the organisation to have writable
access to the exposed data. The Quintessence Add-in encapsulates one of the most popular
presentation components, offering users access to all the data in Excel®.
• Quintessence is an open platform allowing the organisations IT team to integrate applications
seamlessly using the Quintessence API. Further, the intuitive Quintessence Language that
permeates the whole platform allows business analysts to capture and warehouse all
intellectual property associated with the investment and research process.

3. A 100% DATA AGNOSTIC SOLUTION
Quintessence is completely data agnostic, allowing organisations to integrate their data via one
interface. Users thus have access to all their data through one interface, be it administrative data such
as portfolio holdings or market data from the various data providers.
A SHORT USER LEARNING CURVE
The average user accesses the Quintessence Functionality and Data using a handful of functions in
Excel®. This allows portfolio managers and analyst to easily access functions and information in the
pervasive and well known Excel® environment.
A SMALL TURN-AROUND TIME FOR NEW REPORTS AND FUNCTIONS
The Quintessence language encapsulates the functional language of Excel®. This implies that all users
who can navigate Excel® are able to create new functionality using Quintessence. In particular,
reports and functions can be configured in Excel® and then imported into the Quintessence
Integration Engine. This allows for quick turnaround times in deploying new reports, functions and
applications

4. The Quintessence Investment Research platform offers a unique approach to managing and
enhancing your investment process. Unlike traditional solutions, this data agnostic platform facilitates
the integration of all the data within the organisation, making it easily accessible to user in Excel®.
Further, analysts use the worksheet environment to upload their research into the integration engine.
The platform allows the organisation to manage all aspects of their process without compelling users
to leave the Excel® environment.
Quintessence eliminates the risk encapsulated in using a culmination of disparate databases and third
party data-feeds that need to be maintained and continually enhanced. This includes the risk inherent
in the spaghetti knot of spreadsheets built up in the organisation over time with the results of one
spreadsheet dependant on another.
Figure 1 - Typical research environment before Quintessence

5. Using Quintessence, the chief investment officer can eliminate all the unmanageable elements in the
research and investment process. With Quintessence, the worksheet is used in a healthy and robust
manner. In particular, no data is stored in spreadsheets. Yet spreadsheets have access to all data.
Further, algorithms and calculations are still performed in Excel®. However, once these calculations
have been tested and accepted, the algorithms are exported into the Quintessence Integration
Platform, thus facilitating the centralised management of all IP associated with the investment process.
Figure 2 - After Quintessence implementation
CLIENT USE CASES INCLUDE:
• Warehousing in-house analyst research and consolidating the results into live ranking Model
• Index and Benchmark Creation and Maintenance
• Attribution Analysis and Fund Factsheets
• Pre and post trade compliance
• House-view and model portfolio management
• Morning Reports and Company Dashboards