The SEC’s proposal to improve stock-price data available to the public is a step to further democratize financial market data. This weakens the position held by incumbent market data providers such as Bloomberg, FactSet (FDS), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), S&P Global (SPGI), The London Stock Exchange/Refinitiv (LSE) and others.
The SEC’s proposal could be a precursor of what is to come. We would favor a joint effort whereby filing companies, the SEC and a FinTech startup work to build an open platform where financial data – both structured and unstructured – could be easily queried and ingested via APIs and distributed to downstream applications such as Microsoft Excel without any data cleansing required by end-users.
The data preparation and cleansing costs incurred by the incumbent market data providers is in large part the reason why those services are expensive. The current Asset Management industry trends of fee compression and passive investing do not support expensive legacy financial data service models. Time to blow up the status quo.