Exchange Data International (EDI) and Standard & Poor’s have banded together to launch a new company aimed at providing financial institutions with corporate action and dividend data for companies listed globally. The new company, which has been dubbed FinDataPortal (FDP), launched in November last year and is aimed at providing low cost access to this data.
Jonathan Bloch, CEO and founder of EDI and FDP, reckons the new offering is a cost effective alternative for customers that do not wish to purchase EDI’s primary data sets. He believes it will meet the needs of those that have either occasional or distinctive data needs and do not require frequent access to corporate actions data.
“In this economic recession lots of firms are not willing to spend money on large annual fees and would like to only pay for what they are actually using. It seemed appropriate to develop a product that definitely suits this marketplace,” Bloch explains. “Also in the US market there are thousands of players on the buy side that are quite small and cannot afford heavy annual contracts.”
These customers will therefore not be forced to pay for a high annual fee or IT costs to access the data and will instead pay a smaller minimum monthly fee to be credited against the number of times the data is accessed. The theory is that users only pay for the data they are actually using, which enables them to select data sets from different providers to meet their specific data needs, says FDP.
To this end, FDP aims to partner with as many data providers as possible in order to provide comprehensive data coverage for all class of assets worldwide. S&P is the first data provider to display two of their data sets on FDP, with its North American Dividend and UIT data sets.
“We have been talking with S&P for quite a long time on how to widen the audience for their products and capabilities. Given the focus of the product, which is the US domestic market, it was appropriate that the first offering came from a leading provider like S&P and be North American dividends,” explains Bloch.
The two vendors worked on this product for about six months before it got prototyped by S&P to some of their clients, says Bloch, it was then adjusted according to their feedback and suggestions. “We faced two main challenges: the charging structure and the data sets offering. As regards the offering we started with dividends data and then next we will provide a combined offer from S&P and EDI for North American corporate actions. We tested the charging structure on potential clients.”
Bloch reckons that the demand for the service is considerable, especially from small players but also from bigger firms in need of a second source from time to time. He is also happy to report that there is not much direct competition out there in his eyes. “We are only aware of one competitor Xcitek.com, as they provide a range of similar type of products. We hope to have a greater variety of suppliers,” he adds.
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