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Exchange Data International (EDI) has launched a complete replacement service for NYSE Corporate Actions at less than 50% of the redistribution costs charged by NYSE.
“Clients finally have a truly complete and competitive alternative for corporate action data,” said Jonathan Bloch, founder and CEO of EDI, the challenger supplier of global security corporate actions and reference data. “We cover all corporate actions worldwide and that means we do a lot of translation, 36 languages a day. Our goal is to cover single equity worldwide.”
EDI takes the data wherever it can be found — from exchanges, regulators, issuers’ web sites, press release or news services, he said.
Exchanges make significant income from selling data, especially market data. NYSE reported data income of $348 million in 2012, the last year before ICE bought it and aggregated all its data sales. Corporate action data is a much smaller income source but still has the potential to annoy users.
“The provision of reference data has been viewed by many clients as a license for exchanges and legacy providers to print money,” said Bloch. “Many exchanges have been charging top-dollar for data for years, but the recent changes to reporting rules and new redistribution fees announced in June this year have taken many data redistributors to breaking point.”
Some exchanges want to take a cut from every single user, he added.
“Beyond its extremely high fees, NYSE imposed a requirement on its redistributors to provide names of downstream consumers of its data in order to charge an additional levy, should they redistribute the data, making the data more costly. We don’t,” Bloch said.
“Seventy-five percent of our market is redistributors in some form such as solution providers or software integrators.” If they have to pay another fee to the exchange on top of what they pay for the data it can make it uneconomic for them.
“It’s about time the corporate actions sector had a competitive environment: we now provide redistribution users with the same quality data sets, for half the cost, without any onerous redistribution rules,” Bloch added. “As we see it, the corporate actions sector has long needed more competition amongst providers, and our aim is to radically change the status quo, by providing a real alternative and improving the cost-benefit for clients.”
Established in 1994, EDI is a data vendor, not an exchange that morphed into a data business. Covering the major markets with an emphasis on emerging and frontier markets – including Africa, Asia, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East – EDI’s 400 staff research, use smart systems and machine-learning to quality-check and distribute corporate actions and reference date globally. “We’re able to source, check and supply data sets without the massive overheads or burden of legacy technology, passing on the efficiency and cost savings to users,” said Bloch.
