Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

I was reminded when we launched XigniteGlobalRealTime this week of how small the world has become. There was a time when traveling from Europe to my house in California would have taken months by sea, then months by covered wagon. Now I can make the trip in a single non-stop 21-hour flight. Granted, I have to brave the kid kicking the back of my seat, screaming babies, the guy with N1H1 to my right, and the guy to my left who spends all 21 hours trying to sell me life insurance while telling me his life story. But at least I don’t have to worry about scurvy… just airline food.

The world of market data has also gotten much smaller. Not too long ago, getting intraday stock quotes from Europe’s biggest exchanges was simply out of reach for any U.S. company that didn’t have a six-figure technology budget. Now even small startup companies on a shoestring budget can get real-time Level 1 stock quotes from even the smallest European exchanges, not to mention countless other exchanges around the world. What’s next? Frequent data miles for global market data usage? (Hmmm… Not a bad idea.)

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.

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.

One of the toughest things to explain about what we do… is what we actually do…because it can be really obscure and difficult to communicate to non-developers. After giving all the marketing-speak of how we lower TCO, get rid of IT headaches etc, a lot of people come back with “Uh, yeah, but what do you actually DO?”

So, we’ve been working hard to create some pictures that simply, yet accurately describe what we do, and so far this is what we have come up with.

What are financial Web services or Cloud services?

The idea for this picture is that we help companies do the following:

• come to our website, sign up, try and buy our Web services on-demand like Salesforce.com
• since it’s all over the Web, there is no in-house software etc. requried
• get your data by the song (service) instead of a CD (feed) like iTunes
• to make it easier to build financial apps and websites

(Note: for the lawyers, the trademarks above remain the property of their respective owners)

Then, just when we think we’ve done it, they ask: “So, what is this Splice mashup community thingy then?”  This is the picture we came up with for this question…

Splice Web services on-demand community mashup platform

We’re still working on this one, so any help is appreciated.