Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

What does the Albanian Lek, Dominican Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and 140 other global currencies have in common?  They can all be found in the newly updated XigniteCurrencies section.  Redesigned from the ground up, the new currencies section has been expanded to provide the tools and information necessary to get up and running with Global Currency Data.

In addition to covering over 85% of the world’s currencies, there are several improvements that we are very excited about.  First, we have expanded the section to include two new areas, one dedicated to providing detailed product information, and the other dedicated to providing comprehensive developer resources.  We have simplified the sites navigation, while also adding cool new features including several educational videos, expanded product information and an entirely new set of interactive demo applications.  We have even created a step-by-step video on how to get up and running with a simple real-time currency converter.  If you haven’t visited the section recently, you should give it a peek.

Product Resources - Currency Overview - - What Is On-Demand - - Live Forex Demos - - Global Data Coverage -

Developer Resources - How-To Video - - Getting Started - - Forex WSDL File - - Web Service Operations -

What’s most exciting are the countless ways our global currency data can be used. Our customers have proven that it doesn’t matter if you’re an Aviation Catering Company, Armored Transportation Service, National Menswear Retail Chain, Global Automotive Manufacturer or Cool Online Gaming Startup, with XigniteCurrencies, the applications are truly endless.

Everyone has been talking about how much smaller this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference was when compared with previous years, fewer exhibitors and fewer attendees.  But for Xignite, this year’s show was the biggest ever. If you missed us at this year’s SIFMA TMC, we hope to see you next year. Feel free to take a look at the 2009 Xignite SIFMA TMC Photo Gallery by Clicking Here.

Despite the fact that this year’s SIFMA Show was scaled down quite a bit, we were positively overwhelmed with demand at the Xignite booth.  Our staff of seven was slammed every minute they were on the floor, answering questions, giving product demos and handing out free Xignite goodies.  Even after show hours were over, our booth stayed filled with people wanting to talk about on-demand web services.  Even when walking the halls, I overheard many others talking about Xignite, our cool new products and exciting activities that we were sharing at the show.  In retrospect, I wish we had brought a staff of twelve to handle all the demand.

Maybe it was just the Xignite shot machine and free booze we passed out. For me, it was fun demonstrating how it’s a lot easier & cheaper to get data “by the glass” (aka on-demand) rather than getting data “by the fire hose” (aka bulk files and data feeds).  If it was alcohol that brought the hordes a-knocking at our booth, that would give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “generating buzz.”

Or maybe we saw so much demand because people just couldn’t resist the power of our free t-shirts, pens, mouse pads and other freebies.  Maybe it was the awesome VIP Event that we hosted at the Forbes Galleries. Or perhaps everyone heard about us from the recent publicity surrounding Xignite, like the amazing coverage in Inside Market Data or product announcements surrounding XigniteOnDemand and XigniteCorporateActions.

In truth, I don’t think any amount of publicity, bribery or booze could have generated the amount of buzz we saw.  Having talked to many at the show, I got a strong sense that people are more serious than ever about finding game-changing technology, like on-demand web services.  Over and over again I heard people looking for way to simplify data projects, dramatically cut costs and reduce the time it takes to delivery new data initiatives to market.  In these categories, Xignite is the only show in town.

Like the red-headed stepchild of reference data, corporate actions have been easy to neglect for many years, given the time, expense and difficulty of automation.  That is, until the financial crisis combined with globalization to turn corporate actions into a high-priority risk factor.  Like a red-headed stepchild turned Class A felon, corporate actions now threaten portfolios with greater risk than ever.

Before the crisis, globalization had already brought corporate actions to the breaking point.  Portfolios filled with a wide array of securities from companies around the globe naturally required a way to handle corporate actions from a wider array of companies adhering to a wider array of standards and regulations.  Let’s face it.  It’s not easy to build automated systems to handle an increasingly diverse set of data delivered through an ever more diverse set of technology standards.  So, it was easy for corporate action automation projects to fall off the bottom of the priority list.

But now, with the global financial crisis in full swing, the good old days of being able to neglect corporate actions appear to be over.  As companies seek to respond to the crisis, they’re issuing a flood of new corporate actions to reorganize, inject new capital, retain cash and accomplish a host of other creative financial solutions.  For investors and asset managers, it’s as if the red-headed stepchild is on a rampage, knocking over IT’s system building blocks, breaking analysts’ economic models for valuing securities, and generally making asset managers lose their hair.

I wish I could claim it was prophetic that we timed the release of XigniteCorporateActions to coincide with the up-surge in demand we’re seeing for automating corporate actions, but it was really more a matter of luck than foresight.  Still, it’s hard to imagine a time when on-demand financial web services for corporate actions data was needed more than right now.

So, if your red-headed stepchild has been begging to go to juvie in recent months, here’s a little tough-love parenting tip:  Don’t waste the next nine months trying to build your own data management prison to contain your corporate actions problems.  Just dial the Xignite emergency number and ask for an on-demand web service that can lock up your corporate actions problems in a matter of weeks instead of months.

If there’s a silver lining to the global financial crisis, it’s the renewed appreciation for business basics. In this period of uncertainty, company fundamentals and long-term prudence have taken center stage in place of wild-eyed speculation and short-term gains.  One anecdotal example of this trend is the steady increase in demand for XigniteFundamentals, now our seventh most popular web service, providing U.S. company fundamentals and financial data.

In fact, a new appreciation for fundamentals could very well be the solution to the current crisis. Many large, successful companies originally started during tough economic times. Just a few examples include Google, Microsoft, FedEx, CNN, GE and HP. These companies might not have survived their trying early years without an intense focus on the core fundamentals that drive profitability and long-term growth.

In response to this back-to-basics trend, we’ve just launched a new web service, XigniteGlobalFundamentals, providing global company fundamentals for securities listed on many major exchanges outside the U.S.  The service provides market cap, earnings per share, p/e ratios, and beta for companies around the globe. Check out XigniteGlobalFundamentals for yourself.

If you’ve wanted to add real-time stock quotes to your public website, but just couldn’t justify the cost, you’ll want to learn more about BATS.  No, not the baseball equipment or the “rats with wings.”  The BATS stock exchange.  As it happens, BATS is the third largest stock exchange in the world, covering 8,000 securities and processing over 10% of U.S. trades.  Stock for most public companies are traded on BATS regardless of the exchange that lists them.

BATS has very web-friendly licensing terms for public display of its stock quote data, and we’ve just recently launched two new web services for getting stock quotes from BATS:  XigniteBATSRealTime and XigniteBATSLastSale.  Websites can publish BATS stock quotes without needing to sign exchange agreements that tie them to per-user or per-hit fees.

BATS has made adding stock quotes to web sites easy and affordable

We originally launched XigniteBATSLastSale to give our customers real-time quotes from BATS-traded securities. More recently we’ve launched XigniteBATSRealTime for customers with heavier usage requirements.  In XigniteBATSRealTime, we’ve added data that’s more important for intraday traders, such as tick-by-tick quotes and bid and ask prices.

So, if you’ve been waiting for real-time stock quotes to become more economical for public display on websites, it’s time to take another look at your options.

Index Oasis, a company focused specifically on index analysis, is helping financial advisors, money managers and investors to manage their portfolios more wisely, with a web-based software platform. At the center of the Index Oasis system is a new web service offered by Xignite, XigniteIndexComponents.  This Financial Web service provides lists of securities and weightings that are used to calculate over 40  U.S. stock indices.  While XigniteIndexComponents is a fairly simple service, it is the industry’s first on-demand Web service to provide Index Component data.

To us, Index Oasis illustrates how companies can leverage our on-demand platform to obtain only the data that is needed, without the heavy up-front investment in infrastructure, ongoing maintenance costs and lengthy development efforts. By utilizing Financial Web services, Index Oasis realized huge savings in time, development and infrastructure investment, accelerating time to market by 35% and reducing data integration to fewer than 10 lines of code.  This is what Xignite Web Services it is all about, saving time, effort and money.

If you’d like to read more, there is more detail in this feature article by Inside Market Data (you’ll have to register if you are not a regular reader of the site), or you can check out the index components press release.