Intrinio Adds IEX Pricing, Eyes More XBRL Data

Intrinio started life as an application for valuing companies, says chief executive Rachel Carpenter. “To build an application, we needed data. But after looking at the different options, we realized they were extremely expensive. If you were in a position like us as an app developer… and you display the information publicly, you’re going to get slammed with redistribution fees. We couldn’t afford the data for the application, so we said ‘Let’s solve this problem first’,” she says, adding that incorporating real-time data was a big—but necessary—hurdle for the vendor. “In order to be a legitimate provider of data you have to have real-time pricing, but it’s a hurdle because it’s so expensive.”

Carpenter says that the partnership with IEX came about two months ago after the exchange approached the vendor with a similar ethos. 

“They set out to prove that servicing this data is not that expensive, and that people are just charging too much for it. Servicing real-time pricing data should not be $1,500 a month. That’s not what it actually costs. We’ve built [IEX data] into our systems so our users can access real-time pricing data from them,” Carpenter says.

After integrating their platforms, Intrinio went live with IEX’s data last month. 

Intrinio has its own dataset, created by an in-house engine that digests and organizes data collected from company documents using the XBRL financial reporting format. In 2009, the US Congress mandated that every US publicly traded company must file statements in XBRL, making it easier for users to extract, analyze and compare figures for different companies tagged in the same data fields. Whereas some vendors collect this data from reports manually, Intrinio’s algorithm collects the data faster, cleaner, with fewer errors, and enables the vendor to offer its data at an affordable price for everyone.

The vendor is also looking to expand its coverage, starting with the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council) dataset of 6,900 US banks’ quarterly “call reports,” which is used by regulators and investors to evaluate the health of banks, which is also filed using XBRL. “We’re beta testing that now with select banks and users. That’s an exciting dataset because it’s also really expensive from the big providers, Carpenter says, adding that while Intrinio’s dataset is not “huge” compared to that offered by bigger vendors, the vendor is focusing on how well it provides a portion of that data.

Intrinio enables users to capture financial data into applications via an API, and into Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets add-ins, allowing startups and incubators to use its data free of charge for six months to build applications without being subject to excessive redistribution fees—and only charging clients once they launch their applications—and investors to only pay for the data that they consume. For example, a firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions would typically pay the same monthly price for a data terminal, even in months with little M&A activity, where users would not be accessing as much data. “If you’re with us, if you’re not pulling any of the data, you can scale down the pricing during an off month and save some money,” Carpenter says.