Exegy Market Data Blog

Market Data: Beware False Dichotomies

We agree whole-heartedly with the conclusion of the Victor Anderson, Editor in Chief of Waters Technology, article on the importance of service to customers of technology vendors in the financial services industry. While service is a key driver for customers, we also see a strong dependence on technology to deliver great service. Separating these issues creates a false dichotomy.

At Exegy, we lease ticker plants used by the financial services industry to provide critical data to both trading applications and to their enterprise distribution systems.  Many of these applications require extremely low latency, less than 15 microseconds, and very high, do-not-miss-a-tick, reliability.  With more than a hundred ticker plants in the field at colocation facilities around the world, we are committed to providing great customer service round the trading clock.

Customer service in the market data space is hard.  The volume of market data is growing rapidly, client demand for ever lower latency is never ending and new groups within our clients want low latency market data for their non-trading applications delivered in lower cost, more reliable ways.

We could not meet the demands of our clients in this challenging environment without great underlying technology.  We see competitors struggling to provide the required level of service across older technology platforms.  This is a frustrating exercise.  No serious business starts out to deliver bad service but many businesses find that delivering great service based on technology that struggles to keep up with current demands is a losing proposition.  These businesses inevitably try to “refresh” their older technology platforms to answer customer demands for better service but find that an elusive goal.  (We believe this has everything to do with not adopting a corporate culture of continuous innovation – but that is a topic for another blog).  This boom-bust cycle of technology and service is not a reliable solution for clients in the financial services industry.

Our technology platform drives our approach to customer service.  We invest a lot of time and resources to continuously improve our product in order to be able to maintain great customer service.  Not just at “refresh” points in some technology cycle, but continuously, every day.

This implies that managers in the financial services industry need to understand what drives great customer service from a vendor.  Choosing a vendor with an older, struggling platform without a corporate culture of investing in the technology every day is a recipe for a bad service outcome – regardless of the quality of their service organization.

Technology with enough headroom to credibly stay ahead of market data demands while meeting client’s performance and cost metrics is the critical foundation for building a great customer service organization.