Peter Hald Comments: BGCantor Market Data Launches On-Demand Service with Xignite Platform-Wall Street & Technology

Exploring a new channel, BGCantor Market Data — a subsidiary of global interdealer broker BGC Partners, Inc.— is making its data available through Xignite's hosted web service solution, to reduce costs for customers and to help speed up application development.
 

Operating from New York, BGCantor-On Demand solution is leveraging the XigniteOnDemand platform, which provides on-demand financial market data and Web services through the Internet.
 

"It certainly provides an alternative method of getting at our data," said Peter Hald, market director of BGCantor Market Data, in an interview with Wall Street & Technology. Hald said this provides a "fresh value proposition because it allows customers to get at the data over the Internet when they want to and where they want to and pay for the data that they use."
 

BGCantor On-Demand will cover a wide range of fixed income and derivatives data, including benchmark Treasury, European government bonds, foreign exchange, emissions, ELX futures and credit default swaps data.
 

The market data distribution company plans to use BGCantor On-Demand to provide an affordable solution to middle office asset managers and portfolio managers who require timely market data but don't require a full data feed. "This can be quite an enabling offering in that many people have access to the Internet, and not all people have access to internal systems where they have written to data feeds," said Hald. There's also a regulatory aspect to the on-demand offering in that firms are looking "to create transparency into what markets are doing and this is a good way to see what's going on in the IDB marketplace," said Hald.
 

The new BG Cantor On Demand is being run out of New York where there is a link between Xignite's data center and BGCantor's data center, said Hald. Both companies are storing the data as well.
 

This data comes directly out of the BGC Partners' trading systems and it's real time data as well as historical data that represents the wholesale markets, explained Hald.

The main focus will be on external customers that want to run the data in applications, but may not have written to data feeds yet. There is a large group of people in financial organizations who are often in mid-and-back-office areas, in risk or compliance, working with analytics, valuations or different kinds of research, where they need to get the data to calculate something, explained Hald. "They'll be able to get the data right at their desktops, and over the Internet," said Hald.
 

A financial firm may have an urgent need to get the data quickly, and they may not have written to a data feed yet. Since the data comes in a Web services standard, it is very easy to take into applications or spreadsheets to work with the data quickly.
 

"Of course the commercial proposition is a compelling one — customers will only pay for the data that they use," said Hald. Time-to-market is a big argument for on-demand data. The fact that people don't have spent time and money ordering circuits, writing to data feeds and having to operationally manage that data once they bring it into their internal infrastructure, is a compelling argument, he said.
 

BGCantor said its front-office customers might augment their existing feeds by taking advantage of the on-demand flexible, usage-based pricing model. Existing customers may want to empower other users in their organization with access to data as well as new prospects.
 

BGCantor is white labeling the XigniteOnDemand platform to accelerate the firm's time-to-market, developin eleven web services, with the high performance and scalability of cloud computing, including a tightly integrated web site to drive sales and a turnkey administrative portal for managing both the technology and customer accounts, noted the release. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. The platform turns traditional flat files and data feeds into application-ready web services available on the cloud, according to the release.
 

Hald said BGCantor was originally talking to Xignite about potential distribution of its market data. But then the combination of demand from customers and prospects coupled with an understanding of the wider offering of using the white labeled versions of their service, struck home and culminated in the launch of the product. "On demand technology is not widely utilized as of yet, but we certainly see the potential for broader application of it," said Hald
 

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