Exchange Data International (EDI) has listed its securities reference data and corporate actions data on the Airex Market, joining about 50 vendors of financial services apps, information and reports already offering products and services on the online market. Airex went live with a beta version of its digital information market in February 2015, with the aim of providing buyers with easy access to financial products and sellers with access to markets that are expensive to reach.
Financially actionable apps, information and reports on the Airex Market are listed under the Financial AIR banner and include products from suppliers such as Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ, Moody’s, Nasdaq and more. The company says it is working with about 80 vendors and is onboarding those not yet listed on the market.
Stephen Kuhn, Airex CEO, explains: “Our goal is to provide our customers with access to a single source marketplace with the most recognised and respected global financial brands. Today, the traditional direct sales model for digital information such as reference data is less than efficient. Products are priced to support direct sales forces that can’t reach all markets. Airex Market is frictionless. Vendors can reach new markets, generate new revenue and achieve higher margins at lower risk, while buyers can get financial data they couldn’t previously access or afford quickly and conveniently, with no sales people involved and with no contracts to negotiate.”
The Airex financial model means vendors have no fixed costs and list their products for free, sharing revenue on a 70:30 basis with Airex. Buyers can access and consume content using an internet browser and single sign-on, and license content from suppliers. On the buyer side, Airex is initially focusing on small to mid-size professional investors such as hedge funds, private equity funds and wealth managers, but says its value proposition extends to all financial firms and that it expects to scale the demand side over time and through the Airex Market Partner (AMP) programme.
The AMP programme gives partner companies their own hosted, turnkey and custom markets that are co-branded with Airex Market and allow them to offer existing and new customers their own products as well as a link to apps, information and reports from other suppliers on Airex Market. This extends partners’ market reach and at the same time aggregates demand for products on Airex Market. To date, Airex has 24 financial services partners in the AMP programme including investment banks, fintech firms, brokers, fund administrators and custodians.
Kuhn says: “Firms will continue to maintain their relationships with data vendors, but with 90% of vendors managing only 10% of spend, the Airex value proposition covers the long tail of vendor relationships. It can also help strategic vendors lower the cost of products and sales management.”
With the beta Airex Market platform up and running on Amazon Web Services, Airex is planning further development. In the first quarter of 2016, the company is due to open a vendor portal including application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow companies to list financial products on Airex Market themselves. This, Airex suggests, will encourage thousands of vendors to list millions of products. Later in the year, the company plans to use APIs and user interfaces to integrate its functionality into third-party products such as order management, execution management and risk management systems. It also plans to develop an enterprise AMP programme that will allow large firms to run internal, turnkey and co-branded markets for the benefit of procurement departments.
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