Analytical market data provider Benchmark Solutions has appointed Tim Grant has head of sales and marketing.
In this newly-created role, Grant will be responsible for developing new business with buy and sell-side clients; grow the company’s distribution platform, as well as contribute to product development. He will report directly to Benchmark’s chief executive Jim Toffey.
Before joining Benchmark in December, Grant worked for five months, starting in August, at Citigroup as a director reporting to John Williams, head of Citi’s cross product margining operations.
For nine years, ending in December 2008, Grant held a variety of analytics and risk management roles at UBS Group. Most recently, he was a managing director reporting directly to the group’s chief risk officer and group executive board. He also was part of the team responsible for the management of UBS’s workout group.
Grant said that although Benchmark has been researching and developing its market-calibrated pricing engine for over two years, he told Money Management Executive that "we are still relatively new to the marketplace."
"Therefore the initial task at hand is to work with our clients to educate them as to our revolutionary capabilities around pricing credit in real time,” he said.
Moreover, Grant said that “as a provider of advanced solutions around topics such as liquidity, TCA and market impact, we are going to need to build a sales and marketing team that is up to the challenge and this will be a big focus from the outset."
He will also work to build a sales engineering team that will "sit between sales and R&D that can provide the kind of high level quantitative support that our sales and marketing team will need."
"This reflects our strong conviction that our business should be built based on long-term partnership with our clients and that we need to develop a deep understanding of their workflows,” he said.
