Financial Market Data Web Services – Xignite Blog

The Last Hold-Out

The fixed income trading world has been the last hold-out in the broad shift towards electronic trading and more transparent centralized trading venues. We’ve already witnessed the other popular financial instruments including equities, options, futures, and currencies, succumb to the inevitable, but fixed income is still dominated by the murky business of OTC trading. There are signs, however, that even this asset class has finally reached a tipping-point, and that we are now on the verge of a new world where the buy-side’s demands for transparency will finally be realized.

To understand what this future may look like we must first understand how fixed income trading got to where it is today.

When Two Sides Collide

The fixed income trading world has always been defined by the opposing interests of the buy-side and the sell-side.

The buy-side has almost uniformly expressed dissatisfaction at the whole fixed income trading process. Complaints include a complete lack of transparency, an inability to obtain reliable price discovery and market data, the high-cost, and the general inefficiency when compared to the electronic trading of other asset classes. More recently there has been intense pressure to include fixed income in electronic multi-asset trading class strategies.

The sell-side on the other-hand has been highly motivated to keep things status quo. Over the years fixed income trading has been a cash cow business for the large Wall Street dealers. For example, fully 52% of Goldman Sachs’ $45 billion revenue in 2009 came from their fixed income trading division. The sell-side understands that moving fixed income trading away from the OTC model to more exchange-like platforms and Alternative Trading Systems (ATS’s) will almost certainly result in greatly reduced profits. The sell-side in their defense has argued that the sheer volume (3 million fixed-income securities and counting) and the inherent complexity of fixed income products does not lend itself to a more standardized and centralized market.

Innovation around the Edges

That is not to say that there has not been innovation or change. Over the years there have been some key developments Read more

Now that the cat’s finally out of the bag on BGCantor’s new on-demand web services, I can finally take the readers of the Xignite blog back stage for a “behind the scenes” look at the making of the biggest initiative in the on-demand financial web services world since the start of Xignite.

BGCantor On-Demand offers fixed income and derivatives data via on-demand web services using Xignite’s core platform.

What happened behind the scenes?  How did this new on-demand business get launched?  And what did it take to launch it?  Well, first and foremost, it took a great team at BGCantor Market Data.  The BGCantor team was absolutely delightful to work with.  Everyone was highly knowledgeable, very responsive, dedicated to accomplishing the mission and very excited about the whole project.  We couldn’t have asked for a better group to work with.

Together, the BGCantor/Xignite team started by designing web services to be truly application-ready, combining Xignite’s web service experience with BGCantor’s in-depth market data knowledge.  Then we coded the web services on top of the XigniteOnDemand market data distribution platform for rapid development on a robust, high-performance, highly scalable architecture.  At the same time, we also built the BGCantor On-Demand website and tightly integrated it with the web services themselves.  To help manage the new on-demand business, we also deployed an administrative portal for on-going management of customer accounts.  At the same time, on the sales and marketing front, we worked together to find just the right usage-based pricing model to drive strong revenue growth for BGCantor while also delivering exceptional value for BGCantor’s customers.  Then we collaborated on developing marketing collateral and sales tools.

As for showing you blooper videos of our behind-the-scenes footage, I’m afraid I couldn’t quite convince Legal to sign off on that. Sorry. Maybe next time.

Many of our clients have requested to increase our coverage of global Interbank interest rates. So we took the Interbank Rates that were available in XigniteRates and packaged them in our new XigniteInterbanks web service.

We then worked hard on adding a whole new set of interbank rates: HIBOR (Hong Kong), MEXIBOR (Mexico City), BUBOR (Bulgaria), MIBOR (Mumbai), KORIBOR (Korea), PRIBOR (Prague), SABOR (South Africa), TAIBOR (Taipei), TURKIBOR (Turkey), CHILIBOR (Chile), TELBOR (Tel Aviv), CHIBOR (China), SHIBOR (Shanghai), JIBOR (Jakarta), KLIBOR (Kuala Lumpur), TIBOR (Tokyo), PHILLIBOR (Philippines), BKIBOR (Bangkok), BRIBOR (Brazil) and VNIBOR (Viet Nam).

These enhancements, couple with an enhanced relationship with the British Bankers Association, make XigniteInterbanks one of the most comprehensive sources of worldwide interbanks rates and the only web service providing sought-after LIBOR data.