Comtrend Service Lets Clients Tap Broker's Micro For Quotes; 'Gray Area' Opened For Real-Time Exchange Fees

ADP Comtrend is testing a new service that allows a broker's customers to dial directly into the broker's own workstation to retrieve quotes. The service occupies what company officials admit is a "gray area" between real-time and delayed data, and is expected to further cloud the none-too-simple issue of exchange fees.

The service is called "Instaquote." It's been tested for two months with a handful of clients at Comtrend's Canadian subsidiary, and U.S. introduction is awaiting exchange approval. "We just want to make sure we're clear with the exchanges here on being able to do this," says Jim Krok, vice president, client services.

Instaquote is an enhancement to Comtrend's Trendsetter service. Trendsetter's microcomputer workstation -- a Convergent Technologies Ngen -- stores the latest quotes on up to 3900 symbols in memory. Instaquote lets users equipped with an IBM-PC dial in and fetch quotes from the Ngen without disrupting whatever else it's doing. Comtrend provides software that makes it an automatic one-keystroke act. Retail brokers can give Instaquote to their best clients, says Krok, and by doing so relieve themselves of the burden of providing quotes over the phone.

While it does offer real-time data, Instaquote does not offer tick-by-tick quotes -- only a market snapshot on a maximum of 54 issues. In addition, it imposes a ten-minute waiting period between calls. Once a client has retrieved a page of quotes, he is denied access again for ten minutes.

Here's where the exchange fee fun begins. "We think we're outside the window by virtue of the ten-minute limitation," says Blair Doman, general manager at Comtrend's Canadian unit, "but it is a gray area." Most users in the test are only dialing in three to five times a day, he says. "It's not a regular banging away every ten minutes on it."

"If they're doing it in Canada this is news to us," says Tom Haley, vice president, market data services, at the New York Stock Exchange. "They shouldn't be without updating their exhibit with us." Based on MTR's description of Instaquote, says Haley, "it sounds to me like non-pro rates would apply."

"How is the price that he's getting on [Instaquote] different from the price that he'd get from Dow Jones News Retrieval?," asks Haley. The answer is that a DJNR customer has no ten-minute limit. Then again, how is the price he's getting different from the price he'd get just from calling his broker?, asks Doman, acknowledging that there is a "subtle difference between the two."

Nevertheless, Haley is sympathetic. "Giving out quotes is a mundane, boring task, to sit there on the phone and answer the phone and respond to quote inquiries," he says. "People can automate that, [and] we sure don't want to have our price structure stand in the way."

"We just want to provide a very simple program," insists Doman, with "no fancy stuff" like spreadsheet integration. Comtrend plans to keep tight control. Each Ngen has only one dial-in port, which automatically limits access, and Comtrend can disable any given workstation from the network headend if abuses occur. Nonetheless, Instaquote is the sort of service that exchange officials with technophobic inclinations tend to lose sleep over.