AVOX LAUNCHES FREE REFERENCE-DATA WEBSITE

FRANKFURT -- Business entity reference data provider Avox, a subsidiary of Deutsche Börse, [also see Global Investment Technology, June 22, 2009 report on Securities Data Innovation] is opening up access to a subset of over 200,000 verified and maintained business entity data records of its content on a new website, www.wiki-data.com.

The site will contain basic information about those business entities including their legal name, country of incorporation and operation, state/province/region and city of operation (where applicable), and an Avox identifier (AVID).

“The industry has been demanding a low-cost, business-entity-data standard for years” says Ken Price, CEO and co-founder of Avox. “We believe this is a big step toward achieving such a standard, however, we fully intend to collaborate with other key industry players who will add content and significant value to the offering. A successful standard must be a shared standard in our view.”

Avox is publishing the information for free usage in an effort to help facilitate a common standard for business-entity data. Any data record with an AVID attached has been comprehensively verified and is maintained by Avox’s team of data experts. It is also continuously checked by clients and partners because of the built in feedback loop established between these user organizations and Avox.

Avox partnerships with S&P, Markit, IDC and SWIFT are examples of its collaborations. “Wiki-data is yet another example of the collaborative model at work,” says Julia Sutton, Global Head of Customer Accounts for the Institutional Client Group in Citi’s London offices. “Anyone that uses data from wiki-data.com will be consistent with a number of major industry players including Citi, Barclays and Nomura. We see this as a major efficiency play as usage expands.”

Users can purchase additional data attributes or regular updates of the complete file as an annual subscription. Third parties can license the content as the basis for their directory and identification services. Internet access of the data for primary usage is restriction- and cost free. The key objective is for all major industry participants to use the same underlying data.

“By taking the decision to allow the use of their AVID identifier as unlicensed content, Avox have removed one of the key obstacles to creating a genuine community for counterparty identification,” says Richard Snookes, Director, Global Reference Data at Barclays Capital. “The user experiencing a loss related to a bad piece of data quickly effects a transition to being the user with the most accurate data. The wiki-data model magnifies these transitions across multiple data fields and users to present an extremely powerful tool with real scalability.”