Interactive Data Corporation’s Pricing and Reference Data business has introduced in North America a new service for delivery of corporate actions information to clients throughout the day. The service leverages Interactive Data’s acquisition of Xcitek earlier this year (Reference Data Review, April 2007); intraday delivery of corporate actions data was already on the Xcitek product roadmap at the time of the deal.
Foreshadowing the launch of the intraday corporate actions service, Ray D’Arcy, president of sales and marketing at Interactive Data, told Reference Data Review at Swift’s Sibos conference in Boston last month that “the Xcitek market data business has already been integrated and we will be announcing some new developments soon”. “The Xcitek people have been integrated throughout the organisation, rather than being kept separate, to help us with our reference data strategy,” he said. “Xcitek was focused on the job function and workflow of corporate actions. We needed to focus on how to add value beyond the core content. Since the Xcitek people had been working on how to improve and add value to the process, we really wanted to get them involved with our strategy.”
The Interactive Data Xcitek Intra-Day Corporate Actions Service can deliver notification of newly announced and revised events to clients every two hours. The service covers more than 40 corporate actions event types, including mergers, tender offers, exchanges and rights offerings for US and Canadian listed/traded securities. Intraday files are delivered to clients in Interactive Data Xcitek’s standard formats beginning at around 10am ET each day. The compilation of the five intraday files reflects all of the data collected for the standard end-of-day feed available at around 7pm ET.
Interactive Data is hopeful the new service will attract users from outside its core back office market, including the middle and front offices. As explored in the Q4 2007 issue of Reference Data Review’s sister publication A-Team IQ (Unlocking the first link in the chain, page 56), business drivers like the increase in algorithmic trading are conspiring to generate greater demand for up to the minute information on corporate actions in the front office; missed events pose a real risk for programmatic trading models consuming real-time data.
Marty Williams, vice president of institutional data delivery products, Interactive Data Pricing and Reference Data, says: “Our new Intra-Day Corporate Actions Service is designed to collect a broad range of corporate actions data and seamlessly deliver it to clients throughout the day in a streamlined format that integrates into their financial systems and applications. This helps clients more efficiently review and process data that can be used as an input to make informed investment decisions.”
The extension of the intraday corporate actions service to Europe and the addition of further event types are on the data vendor’s radar for the future, it says.
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