San Francisco-based market data management specialist VendEx Solutions has launched VSource, an interactive digital catalogue of market data vendors, products and services, containing details of more than 3,700 active vendors at launch.
VSource uses a proprietary alphanumeric taxonomy, the VID (patent pending), to capture product and service information at a granular level, enabling firms to research and compare authenticated financial technology and assess emerging technologies by vendor, product, service, geography, delivery, asset class, instrument type, and more.
VendEx was founded in 2019 by a team of market data veterans looking to shake up the market data marketplace by creating a centralised hub for managing the relationship between financial institutions and their data providers.
“VendEx’s goal is to eliminate the friction caused by the number of vendors out there and the way that vendors and consumers interact,” says Richard Clements, CEO. “We realised that we needed to create a solution that would help financial institutions understand what they have and what’s available. VSource, our definitive vendor catalogue, is a key component of the ecosystem we’re building.”
The VSource directory covers not only market data products and services, but also trading platforms and analytics products. “VSource spans across the board of what we consider market data vendors,” says Clements. “So for example, if it’s a solution running relatively complex price and yield calculators on structured finance instruments, requiring a number of different data inputs on cash flows, VSource will cover that.”
Clements is keen to point out that VSource does not rank vendors or provide any detail about product benefits. “We just provide specifics about what the product attributes are. We take copy from the vendors and edit it so that it’s clean, by taking out all superfluous language, things like ‘world class’, ‘best in breed’, ‘award winning’ etc., and we get down to the brass tacks. We represent all vendors equally and fairly in our system and take a very neutral view of how we describe both the vendors and their services,” he says.
Every vendor on VSource has its own homepage, with over 70 fields of foundational information, including whether they’re public or private, where their headquarters are, the offices they have around the world, contact information, and details of the C-suite. Financial data is also included for publicly traded entities. Every product from each vendor also has its own product page.
“We have three levels of data currently,” says Clements. “Level One is just basic vendor information. And to date we’ve identified 3700 vendors. Level Two is where we have foundational data on the vendor. Level Three is where we’ve broken down the products, and Level Four is vendor contributed information. We currently have just under 500 vendors that are at Level Three, and that number is rapidly growing.”
A critical component of VSource is the patent pending VendEx ID (VID), a 42 character alphanumeric code that gets tied to every product and service on the system.
Later this year, the company plans to launch VLink, a portal where vendors can communicate not only with the system, but also with their clients. “The standard VLink service will be free for vendors, so they’ll be able to can see their own data and request edits, changes, or updates to that data to ensure it’s accurately reflecting the company and the products and services they provide,” says Clements. “The premium VLink service will allow them to submit their own marketing materials next to the VendEx copy, which will include tear sheets, one pagers, PowerPoints and videos as well as publish alerts on new products, end of life, etc.”
Regarding the commercial model, customers pay a licence fee for VSource, depending on the size of the institution, and the number of logins that they have, says Clements. “We’re also licensing VIDs in bulk to both the consuming institutions and the vendor institutions. Vendors however can sponsor, so the consumers will get those VIDs for free.”
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