- The cost, time and risk of switching between vendors will no longer be a significant hindrance to vendor selection for financial institutions.
- Tier II market data vendors will face fewer barriers to entry, increasing supplier competition.
- The current technical complexity of market data systems will be drastically reduced through a known, standardised layer of code.
LONDON – 22 January 2017 – A new report from GreySpark Partners, a leading global capital markets consulting firm, examines the market data end-user API abstraction layer that financial institutions can utilise to overcome proprietary market data vendor technologies. The chief focus of the report is the maturing open source initiative called OpenMAMA, which provides the API source code.
The report, Achieving Vendor-agnostic Market Data APIs, compares the abstracted target-state model of market data systems architecture with the status quo, and it introduces the benefits that end-user level abstraction can provide financial institutions. An open source abstraction layer will cause sizeable changes to the market data ecosystem, including:
- financial institutions can overcome vendor lock-in, which hampers decision-making and enables market data vendors to exercise excessive supplier power over end-users;
- market data systems will become more scalable and more agile as IT teams can develop end-user applications based on a common standard, rather than conforming to different proprietary technologies;
- financial institutions can lower the total cost of ownership of their market data systems through sharing development resources and leveraging the benefits of the open source approach; and
- market data end-users can reduce the budgetary burden of developing non-competitive software and refocus budgets on development work that can provide competitive advantage.
Jonathan Chambers, GreySpark analyst consultant and lead author of the report, said: “Displacement programs alone are insufficient to tackle the global rising costs of market data. Looking at the bigger picture and replumbing market systems with an end-user level abstraction level can remove the burden of proprietary technologies and the associated inefficiencies”.
Rachel Lindstrom, GreySpark senior consultant and report co-author, added: “The status quo of market data systems are overly complex, for no business benefit, and by reducing the end-user level complexity can reduce the budgetary burden of the system.”
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Notes to Editors
For further information on GreySpark’s research, please e-mail: press@greyspark.com