Markit has teamed up with real-time event data specialist Selerity to automate production of its Markit Dividend product and deliver dividend announcements on an intraday rather than end-of-day basis. By integrating Selerity’s US dividend event data into Markit Dividend,
Markit will not only be able to generate automated intraday alerts for equity option traders on a 45-minute time delay, but also allow its own analysts to use the Selerity platform to identify dividend announcements from US companies in real time and update their dividend forecasts as information enters the market.
Markit is Selerity’s first content partner, and the partnership appears to have been sparked from CEO Ryan Terpstra’s connection to Donal Smith, former CEO of Data Explorers, which was acquired by Markit last year. Smith, who worked with Terpstra at Thomson Financial, is chairman of Selerity. He left Markit in the wake of the acquisition to found Credit Benchmark, which provides aggregated analysis of trading firms’ proprietary credit ratings and risk assessments.
According to Rob Jaeger, managing director of equities at Markit, “In the past, our analysts have worked manually to source dividend information, but this is time-consuming. Using Selerity’s interface to track dividend events, our analysts will be able to deliver more accurate and timely dividend forecasts. By integrating Selerity’s feed into ours, we will also be able to deliver alerts to customers on an intraday basis.”
Markit plans to take its enhanced dividend services to market this summer and with the inclusion of Selerity data will be able to alert users to changes to US companies’ dividend amount, ex-dividend date, record date and payable date.
Markit already has over 130 clients worldwide using its XML dividend feed, which covers more than 6,500 global equities and forecasts dividend amounts and payment schedules for up to four years enabling users to improve pricing of dividend baskets and portfolio revenue estimations. These existing clients will receive the enhanced service at no additional cost.
Says Terpstra: “When we sell our dividend product, Markit is often mentioned as the dividend forecast expert so working together is a natural fit. We will go to market together as there is a link between Markit’s forecasting service and our low-latency offering.” As well as sharing technology to enhance Markit Dividend, the partners are pondering whether other Markit products could benefit from a similar Selerity treatment.
Selerity will continue to offer latency sensitive customers its Low Latency Dividend Event Data Feed that delivers machine readable announcements from primary sources on over 1,600 companies and is available as a co-located, ultra-low latency data feed and as a real-time, internet based application program interface.
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