Avox, a DTCC subsidiary and provider of reference information on legal entities, is replacing its free wiki-data service with AvoxData, a web service that will continue to provide free wiki-data type content, but also a subscription element for access to more detailed business entity records. AvoxData was developed with an Avox client and went live last week.
Avox intends to migrate wiki-data users to AvoxData, but says the wiki-data site will remain open while this is done. Ken Price, CEO and co-founder of Avox, says: “AvoxData has the functionality of wiki-data and a log-in facility that will give clients additional information they have subscribed to. We already have records of over 450,000 entities, but we will soon increase this to around 800,000 records, which is about 80% of liquid trading names globally.”
Basic information that will continue to be offered as part of the free AvoxData service includes: an entity’s legal name; place of incorporation and business; trading status; parental information; Avox’s AVID identifier; and a provisional legal entity identifier (LEI) based on the LEI solution proposed to the Financial Stability Board (FSB) by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Global Financial Markets Association.
Additional information available as part of the subscription model includes: access to the complete Avox standard field set for subscribed legal entities; the ability to export legal entity details to pdfs; tracking of challenges to data and new entity registrations; a faceted search facility; monitoring entities of interest for changes; and the inclusion of client specific identifiers linked to AVID’s and LEIs once they are finalised and available.
Price cites firms such as Dun & Bradstreet as potential competitors in the entity reference data space, but says: “We have a more focused set of data and a focus on timeliness. AvoxData’s differentiator is that it leverages a collection of intelligence based on a series of news and data feeds supplemented by client data as clients can challenge data that is part of the service.”
Avox intends to include LEIs in its database when they are finalised and used as part of the global LEI solution that is the remit of the FSB. It will download them from any LEI utility that is implemented and use them in its offering to clients. One such utility could be provided by DTCC, which has been working with Swift on a proposal for a central registration authority and utility for the LEI, a proposal that was pushed back by the FSB early this month when it changed course to favour a federated approach to the LEI.
