EOSE Preps Bespoke Data Sourcing Service for Financial Firms

EOSE Data, a UK-based data consultancy, plans to begin offering custom data procurement services for clients in the coming months. EOSE advises brokerages on setting up and structuring data businesses, and acts as a sales agent for data from brokers and niche data providers.

Suzanne Lock, CEO of EOSE, says financial firms began approaching the company with specific requests for data they found hard to obtain, because of its experience selling niche datasets.

“We found ourselves doing more data sourcing, and we will look to start doing more sourcing over the next six weeks to two months,” Lock says, describing the service as a “data concierge” service that EOSE plans to offer free of charge to clients, and fund by charging vendors a “finder’s fee” if EOSE presents their data to clients. “We want people to come to us with a wish list. It helps firms’ procurement teams, and it helps our niche provider clients to reach new audiences.”

Firms might come to EOSE because they want to find a particular dataset that isn’t from—or might only be available when bundled as part of a more expensive data package by—their incumbent suppliers. They might also be looking for a cheaper alternative, or to receive certain datasets through different delivery mechanisms.

In some cases, firms approach EOSE because they want data from a specific source that isn’t yet ready to provide it commercially—often because the provider does not have a commercial model or a practical delivery mechanism in place—and EOSE’s core business has been advising companies that have data assets but lack the knowledge or resources to productize and market them.

EOSE has hired Jeremy Jones, who previously spent nine years at Refinitiv (and previously Thomson Reuters) as a fixed income relationship manager, to lead its procurement business.

Lock says EOSE hires asset class specialists such as Jones, rather than salespeople, to bring a “deep experience” to the challenges facing its clients. Such challenges include the need to implement cost-cutting measures that go beyond the low-hanging fruit of replacing expensive services with cheaper alternatives, or negotiating lower prices with vendors. This benefits EOSE’s clients among brokers with niche data assets, who can provide more specialized data, cheaper than major vendors, and can be more nimble in how they respond to client demand, she adds.