SmartStream Technologies is building out its Reference Data Utility (RDU) – informally known as the SPReD Securities Product Reference Data platform – through the addition of data vendor agreements with Interactive Data, Exchange Data International, SIX Financial Information, S&P Capital IQ, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Euromoney Tradedata.
These agreements add to a tie-up with Thomson Reuters made last month and covering reference data including the company’s open source PermID identifiers. SmartStream is also working towards agreements with Markit on credit default swaps reference data, with Bloomberg on reference data including Financial Instrument Global Identifiers, formerly Bloomberg Global Identifiers, and with other data vendors providing data that clients want the RDU to process on their behalf.
The company says both client and data vendor interest in the utility is high, and despite some early misgivings about the role of data vendors in relation to utilities, no data vendors have yet refused to work with the RDU. Instead, they view the utility model as an additional channel to distribute their data.
Philippe Chambadal, CEO at SmartStream, explains: “Clients and prospects want to spend more with their data vendors, not less, as a result of regulatory initiatives or to add value to their businesses. The RDU’s mission is to lower the cost of processing reference data. Delivering on that mission creates opportunities for data vendors as we open up space for additional spend by lowering data integration costs, one of the biggest barriers to purchasing more vendor data.”
While SmartStream has reached a number of agreements with data vendors, it declines to say which are up and running at the utility, but does confirm that exchange feeds used by the investment banks backing the RDU are being outsourced to the utility and that further additions will be made to the data vendor community working with the utility in line with client requirements.
The SmartStream RDU was officially launched last month and is owned jointly by SmartStream, which is the largest shareholder, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. It is, essentially, SmartStream’s existing multi-tenanted data management service dropped into a new subsidiary company and already has over 20 customers including the founding banks as well as other banks, hedge funds and exchanges.
