EDI Switches to API, Expands Datasets

Financial data provider Exchange Data International (EDI) is migrating its feed delivery from file transfer protocol (FTP) to an application programming interface (API) and expanding its securities data to include 2.5 million global fixed income securities.

Jonathan Bloch, CEO of EDI, says the switchover, which will happen in January 2019, was prompted by client demand, particularly from portfolio managers who prefer peer-client and API to FTP feeds.

“It’s a very big project because we’ve had to put all of our data into a data lake, then the API allows people to select the data they want,” Bloch says, adding that EDI is doing the work in house.

The London-based company’s expanded Evaluated Bond Pricing is currently available via FTP but will switch over with its other products in January. Initially, the dataset covered Canadian fixed income securities but it now includes corporate bonds, municipal bonds, syndicated bank loans, agency mortgage-backed securities, non-agency asset-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations.

“It’s a major departure for us, because historically, we’ve only had reference data, corporate actions and closing prices for listed securities, and now we can cover the fixed income market, which is predominantly not listed—it’s predominantly OTC,” Bloch says, adding that as the securitization market has evolved and grown more complex, the demand for reliable pricing data has increased.

“The price [of the expanded dataset] is determined by the number of securities and what the use case is. Basically, it’s an additional cost.”

He says clients that have already signed up for the services include tier 1 banks, hedge funds, service providers and organizations working in compliance and regtech. They receive a daily source of independent prices for valuations, portfolio analytics, best execution reporting, and risk management calculations.

A key feature, Bloch says, is that EDI clients are not required to expunge the data should they decide to cancel the service.

“Most data vendors, particularly the big ones, require you to expunge the data if you cancel the contract. So if you’re trying to maintain a historical database, it becomes very difficult to cancel the contract with somebody without paying them a huge sum of money or finding an alternative source for that historical data,” he says, a practice he calls “a major barrier for the firms going to another provider if they want to get a cheaper price or better service.”