Financial data processor

Financial data vendors have been in existence as long as financial data has been available. The first technology that allowed data vendors to disseminate was the ticker tape starting in the 1870s. Financial data includes "pre-trade" such as bid-ask data necessary to price a financial instrument and post-trade data such as the last trade price and other transaction data.

From ticker tape to television cameras, from databases to websites this multibillion-dollar industry provides data utilized in the financial sector. Paper ticker tape became obsolete in the 1960s, as television and computers were increasingly used to transmit financial information. The concept of the stock ticker lives on, however, in the scrolling electronic tickers seen on brokerage walls and on news and financial television channels.

Because the financial investment needed to provide the services needed, the industry had become ever more consolidated, but in 2004 it was forecast that the industry was beginning to fragment.

Most of the market differentiation between competitors is based on some combination of the following:

Delivery frequency - Data can be updated in real-time, delayed, conflated, or end of day.

Delivery latency - vendors offer different amounts of data latency, with lower latency typically being more expensive and more complex. An individual vendor may offer different products with different latencies.

Delivery method - Data is delivered either in a streaming format, or as snapshot files of streamed data, or as "end of day" files showing the position at the close of business of a certain market or region