All Wombat market data software products are designed to give our customers maximum flexibility by remaining agnostic to data vendors, middleware vendors and third party technology vendors alike.

Market data users are feeling increasingly frustrated by the range of heavy handed tactics used by leading data and technology providers to lock in business. Aggressive contracts are often employed to provide high level leverage. Users are finding themselves locked into the proprietary symbology of vendors, locked into their APIs and locked into their middleware. Very often users find themselves in the position where the have to pay to get connected to the data feeds, pay for their data packages, pay again for a distribution infrastructure, then pay an additional fee for each user who accesses the data. In some cases additional licenses are required just to allow application developers to use client side APIs.

Huge changes in trading patterns are now propagating through the market data industry. Decimalization and reduced transaction costs have accelerated automation to drive down average trade sizes, while creating huge increases in quote volumes. Data latency is becoming a fundamental competitive battleground; meanwhile exponentially increasing data volumes are stressing systems industrywide. Fragmentation of the liquidity pool between the major exchanges, ECNs and internal crossing networks is making it more difficult than ever to find a match.

The ongoing results of these changes may make market data delivery a more important cornerstone of the trading floor than at any time in the last decade. Increasing volumes will force all firms to restructure their market data technology or get swamped. Meanwhile direct access, faster, accurate and complete data is required to compete. Market data users will need maximum flexibility to survive and prosper through what could be difficult times.

At Wombat both our software and business model are designed to provide our customers with maximum choice. Some components are summarized below: