Xtrakter has launched a new mark to market valuation service, dubbed XM2M, which it says is the first in a series of new tailored information offerings from the firm. XM2M is aimed at providing interdealer brokers and market makers with fixed income market prices, both traded and quoted, to assist them in determining the market value of their assets and in conducting price testing.
“We are in constant dialogue with our clients, we recognised early last year that they desired a new data service and we enhanced our product offerings to meet their needs, ”claims Graeme Austin, director of product management at Xtrakter.
The prices for the service are sourced from around 150 financial institutions, according to the firm, and it is the first product to be created out of Xtrakter’s new data warehouse. Kevin Milne, CEO of Xtrakter, explains that the firm has been engaged in the development of its information services department and its new data warehouse over the past year. “We have been working closely with our clients to create a flexible data product that would meet the ever changing needs of the market. We aim to roll out more information products over the next six months,” he says.
Xtrakter indicates that it has worked with the industry and specific market segments to determine the requirements for these new products. Going forward its hopes the data warehouse will allow the firm the opportunity to deliver new solutions in shorter delivery cycles. Richard Woodward, product manager at the firm, adds: “Overall it has taken approximately 12 months. A prerequisite to delivering any new tailored products was the need to build our new data warehouse; this alone took 12 months to implement, further refining ideas with clients over the last six months.”
According to the firm, XM2M expands on the repository’s new flexible delivery format, its fixed income data and allows subscribers to slice and dice information as they see fit. Accordingly, subscribers no longer need to take bulk files, they can extract the information they require by providing a set of ISINs and obtain the data in a flexible format tailored to meet their needs, claims Xtrakter.
Austin explains some of the difficulties faced in the development process: “There were challenges bringing over 20 years of historic market and reference data online, it equated to in excess of four terabytes of data, including real time replication of 2 million records per day.” Xtrakter therefore adopted a rapid application development (RAD) approach to the product development lifecycle, with a view to minimising the latency between project inception and final delivery.
The firm reckons its market offering will stand up against the strong competition in the valuations market. “The challenges currently facing the industry include the provision of independently sourced asset valuations over a wide range of financial instruments. Clients have an urgent requirement for accurate price testing and portfolio valuation. XM2M and XNAV enable market participants to source accurate price information from a reliable vendor that will aid them accurately value their portfolios, positions and holdings,” claims Milne. “Xtrakter’s unique data contributions from leading market participants means it is a golden source of fixed income pricing information. There is no other supplier offering this exact data, although some others do provide valuation services.”
A bold statement to make indeed; it will be interesting to see the take-up of the service over the next few months.
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