MayStreet‘s CEO, Patrick Flannery, outlines the company’s three-fold plan to expand its client services and grow its business.
In June, we were happy to close our Series A funding round, bringing aboard Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors and several others as our partners. It was a pivotal moment and the culmination of a tremendous amount of hard work, but in the days and weeks after the announcement, we heard from many with the same question: “What are you going to use the money for?” As we’ve noted previously, we believe the market is ripe for platforms like ours, and consequently, we have a clear, three-fold plan to expand the services we provide our clients—and to grow our business.
Part One—Increased coverage
The first eight years of MayStreet’s history were spent building a platform that is second to none, and the main reason for that is the quality of our data. Our initial approach was purposefully targeted—the major North American and European markets, focused on equities and, to a lesser extent, options and futures. But our funding round will allow us to fully build out the data we collect across both asset classes and geographies.
We’ve begun adding data for markets in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, and expect to have full geographic coverage—225+ exchanges and trading venues worldwide—by this time next year. This allows us to better serve both our large global customers as well as regional market participants focused on their own turf.
Also, we’re growing our asset class coverage. Last week we announced the expansion of our US Cash Treasury data offering with Fenics data now available alongside eSpeed and BrokerTec, and we plan to steadily add more fixed income markets globally along with FX, Futures, Options, Commodities and as well as emerging electronic assets—think power and mortgages. There’s a huge opportunity to further help our clients as markets globally continue to electronify—look no further than how crucial electronic fixed income trading platforms have been in helping the industry manage risk throughout extreme volatility these past five months.
It may seem boastful, but we truly believe that by allowing clients to work with the highest quality possible data, for every market and asset class globally, we can beat the incumbents. Particularly as our model changes the purchasing paradigm by reducing or removing costs around things like duplicative feeds, colocation, integration, storage, and the software to extract from the ocean of data. Delivery via the cloud also increases timeliness and transparency. That’s what we mean by a modern market data platform.
Part Two—Fully build out the MayStreet Terminal
The MayStreet Terminal allows data scientists to access, programmatically, all the data we have—currently 12 petabytes and growing—through a single access point. The core idea here is simple: the future of finance is about automation, and automation is built with code. We’re providing the foundation for automation with extremely high quality, broad global coverage and software libraries to work with that data——all adjacent to infinite computing and storage capacity. One of the Terminal’s most powerful attributes is that it eliminates the need to store then pull data to work with it. Instead, you take your logic to the data, which results in a huge saving in time and resources. You can get the data in any format and do the calculations you want—without all the tiresome prep work.
Over the coming months, we’ll be adding to our library of powerful off-the-shelf queries as well as beefing up our visualization tools. In short, we believe the MayStreet Terminal will become the go-to place for anyone who wants to really dive deeply into the biggest pool of global market data on the planet. And get insights fast.
Part Three—Deploy a cloud-based, consolidated managed solution
As several of our folks who’ve worked in the trading platform space know all too well, effectively provisioning data to OMS and EMS platforms is no easy task. Just look at the analyst reports that regularly cite market data challenges among the top frustrations of users.
We’ve long heard, however, that our platform is architected in a way ideally suited to solving these issues. Further, we believe a next-generation entitlement system can move the industry forward. As the market data vendor of record for a trading system, it’s necessary to prove you know every single user who has access to your data and that you can switch their access on and off. There are a host of complicating factors around usage type (displayed vs. non-displayed), user (pro vs. non-pro), and latency (real-time vs. delayed), but these are the kind of nitty-gritty technology challenges we excel at. And now we’ll be able to devote the resources to solve them.
Feeding the beast
Last year’s global appetite for market data was $32 billion, according to analyst firm Burton-Taylor. But predictions for the future based on present usage may actually underestimate the real demand for data. That’s because the more automation continues to take hold—especially in asset classes like fixed income where mind-numbingly large transactions occur daily—the greater the need for high-quality data.
And that’s where we really stand out. The incumbents launched in an era where data was mostly consumed by people sitting in front of screens. We’re built from the ground up to supply data at the scale, speed, and quality needed by machines running the AI that’s beginning to drive market behavior.
Our recent injection of capital, combined with our past eight years of development and real-world experience, position us very favorably for the future. It’s going to be an exciting road to travel.
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