Exchange Data International (EDI) has introduced a corporate actions service that it says undercuts data redistribution costs charged by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). EDI’s move is a response to a June 2017 NYSE policy that extends redistribution charges for corporate actions data in the equities space.
Jonathan Bloch, founder and CEO of EDI, explains: “Beyond its extremely high fees, NYSE imposed a requirement on its redistributors to provide names of downstream consumers of its data in order to charge an additional levy, should they redistribute the data, making the data more costly. We don’t do that.”
EDI has built up its corporate actions business over the past 20 years and in 2015 decided to source data on companies listed on NYSE independently of the exchange. The company has since built a corporate actions service based on this data and contends that its stance could be a game changer. Bloch says: “It’s about time the corporate actions sector had a competitive environment. We now provide redistribution users with the same quality datasets, for half the cost, without any onerous redistribution rules.”
He says redistributors are worried that other exchanges will follow NYSE’s approach, making corporate actions data expensive at a time when users are beginning to view it as a commodity. As well as containing redistribution costs, EDI is using technology tools, including web monitoring and machine learning, to automate as much corporate actions data processing as possible and deliver accurate and affordable services.
