A financial data vendor provides data to financial firms, traders, and investors. The data distributed is collected from sources such as a stock exchange feeds, brokers and dealer desks or regulatory filings (e.g. an SEC filing).
Contents |
Financial data vendors have been in existence as long as financial data has been available. Financial data includes "pre-trade" such as bid/ask data necessary to price a financial instrument and post-trade data such as the last trade price and other transaction data.
Because of the financial investment needed to provide the services needed, the industry had become ever more consolidated, but in 2004 it was forecast that the industry was beginning to fragment.[1]
From ticker tapes to television cameras, from databases to websites this multi billion dollar industry provides data to the trading rooms and consumers.
According to the 2009 Burton-Taylor report, the Market Data industry exited 2009 at US$22.68 billion after closing 2008 at US$23.01 billion. In 2009, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg market share were virtually even, at 29.4% and 29.2% respectively. The largest four financial data vendors represent the USD 15.222 billion tip of an enormous global market (2008 Annual figures [2] [3][4] [5]) and employ tens of thousands of people [6][7][8][9]
There are many different types of instruments (including stocks, bonds, funds, options, futures, currencies, etc.) and hundreds of different markets for investment, leading to an extremely large and hard to define universe of data.[10]
The types of data offered varies by vendor, and most typically covers information about entities (companies) and instruments (shares, bonds etc.) which companies might issue. Typically, pricing data is sold separately from other related data, such as corporate actions and events, valuation information, fundamental data including company performance and reference data on the entities and instruments themselves.
Most of the market differentiation between competitors is based on some combination of the following:
Many vendors began as local companies, serving their own local markets. However, through merger and acquisition[11][12][13] and in response to the increasing globalisation of world markets, vendors now describe themselves as global.
The industry is largely a hidden one - both to the general public and even to some extent to its users. To begin to overcome this, in 2010, The Software and Information Industry Association introduced its Professional Certification Qualification through its Financial Services Division. By July 2011 124 professionals had passed the examination required to receive certification [14]