Aditi Roy: Greetings and thanks for joining this short program. I’m excited to share the news today that our friends over at Solve Advisors, the global leader of pre-trade price transparency in the fixed income markets, has acquired two credit and municipal bond data and analytics providers, Advantaged Data and Best Credit Data. This is a major disruption to the fixed income market, so we wanted to dig into the implications today. Solve Advisors provides clients the full picture of the fixed income markets by addressing its data fragmentation and lack of price transparency. Solve Advisors helps its clients execute with confidence in these opaque markets by providing the world’s largest observable fixed income pricing datasets. Transparency into active deals and real-time, pre-trade prices and reference data helps clients ensure best execution. I’m excited to be joined today by Eugene Grinberg, CEO of Solve Advisors, who can talk to us a little bit about the acquisitions and what they mean for the market. Eugene, thanks for joining me.

Eugene Grinberg: Thank you Aditi, I’m excited to be speaking to you.

Aditi Roy (1:10): I know a lot has gone into this pair of acquisitions, can you lift the veil a little bit and tell us how you got to today?

Eugene Grinberg (1:17): Yes, of course. It certainly took a lot of work from the Solve Advisors’ side, the Advantage Data and Best Credit folks, as well as our partners at Charles Bank. Interestingly this comes on the heels of a recent announcement, that we raised another round through Charles Bank Capital Partners. What became a good problem to have is as we were going through our process we were approached by the Advantage Data team, about them looking at potential strategic exits. As soon as we started speaking, it became clear that Solve was a great home for Advantage Data and Best Credit. It took a tremendous amount of work, but I’m super excited to be over the finish line.

Aditi Roy (2:13): That’s great. Well let’s take a step back and talk about your big vision for how Solve Advisors will be solving the fixed income markets into the future.

Eugene Grinberg (2:22): To really step back, we started Solve almost 11 years ago. My fellow Co-founder Gerard Nealon and I in the prior life, we were looking to bring another product to market. As a result, we got a lot of exposure to various cohorts of the market and really learned about some of the problems they were facing and what some of the needs were. At the end of the day everything came down to price transparency. When it comes to the buy side for instance, the buy side is typically on the receiving end of many thousands of daily messages from their trading counterparts from the sell-side. It’s all this information that’s coming across in emails, spreadsheets, and chats and it’s virtually impossible to process it in the real-time fashion and really take advantage of the data. On the sell-side, you have traders that are making markets that don’t really have a lot of visibility into what the rest of the street is doing. Then on the service provider side, so we’re talking about pricing services and accounting firms, these folks are critical to the industry, and they’re supposed to opine on unfair values of these highly liquid assets. In reality, they’re in a bit of an information vacuum themselves since they’re not privy to these to the trading chat between the buy side and the sell-side. What we’ve done at Solve is build best in class National Language Processing, Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence tools that can do aggregate pricing from all corners of the market across multiple asset classes and deliver this to our clients across all these cohorts in in real-time and with an extremely high level of accuracy.

Aditi Roy (4:38): And how will this pair of acquisitions of Advantage Data and Best Credit Data help Solve reach that vision to provide a full picture of the fixed income markets?

Eugene Grinberg (4:48): What’s becoming increasingly clear to us as we talk to more clients, the data that we’ve been able to collect is unique and the coverage is vast. Some clients need more help, new tools analytics workflows to boil down the many observations that we’re able to capture from the market (bids, offers, price talk, etc.) into a singular price. They need tools and analytics that allow to capture relative value from across the market to try to visualize pricing movements and that’s something that the Advantage Data team has done extremely well. Their products are that singular composite price across multiple asset classes and they have some interesting analytics visualizations that help us further our vision to bring more transparency and full visibility of the markets to the fixed income ecosystem.

Aditi Roy (6:01): Given all those new resources coming in, what should we expect to see out of Solve Advisors this year in 2022?

Eugene Grinberg (6:09): 2022 should be a very interesting year. One thing that we’re super excited about is trying to leverage the unparalleled datasets that we’re able to collect from the market, driving home the value of the data and focusing on market summaries, identifying interesting stories in the data and building a lot of infrastructure that helps tell the story to the market and show how valuable this data is. That’s obviously the big focus for 2022, in addition to making sure that we do a good job of integrating the products and bring even more value, better data, better analytics to our joint clients.

Aditi Roy: Well, we are very excited to watch your story unfold this year, I thank you for your time today and to those watching, thanks for joining us to learn more about Solve Advisors, you can head to www.solveadvisors.com. Eugene it’s been a pleasure speaking with you and looking forward to connecting again soon.

Eugene Grinberg: Likewise, it’s been great speaking Aditi.