New Nordic exchange combines OMX feeds

Swedish exchange group and technology provider OMX has combined the market data from three of its subsidiaries, the Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki exchanges, creating a single feed of Nordic market data, officials announced last week.

Peter Belling, president of information services at OMX in Copenhagen said the exchange had unbundled the equity, fixed income and derivatives data from each exchange and combined them into single central feeds across each asset class.

Belling said the intention is that, with the Nordic and Baltic markets brought together under one organisation and set of rules, the cost of capital will drop – as will the cost for customers to connect to OMX and its data feeds, while also making it easier and cheaper for OMX to add new markets and services.

The traded market is organised into three segments by size – large-cap, mid-cap and small-cap – and is divided into sectors according to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) from MSCI and Standard & Poor's.

The Nordic Exchange will offer three main feed options: Nordic Equity Level 1, which includes best bid and offer, index values and company disclosures; Nordic Equity Level 2, which adds the top five best bid and offer prices; and Nordic Equity Level 2+, which will carry an order book with depth to 20 levels, research and analysis and index weights, as well as values, liquidity measurement indicators, corporate actions data and free-float information. Level 2+ will become available next year, Belling said.

For bonds and derivatives data, only a five-deep Level 2 feed will be available, he said. All data – whether from the Saxess equity trading system, the Click derivatives trading system, reference data or news from OMX's CDS Company Disclosure System — is collected by the exchange's Targin data platform. Belling said this means customers have to deal with only one price structure, one reporting system, one account manager and one audit process. OMX also plans to make corporate actions data and accounting data available via Targin in Q2 next year.

"Our main strategy is that all data will be provided by this system," Belling said. However, to reduce latency, Belling said OMX will allow vendors to connect directly to its trading systems using the FAST (FIX Adapted for Streaming data) protocol.

Belling said OMX currently provides data via 171 vendors to more than 130,000 real-time terminals – though this figure could include overlap of end users using multiple services to access data from the individual OMX exchanges under the previous structure.

Belling added that redistributors with a licence for Danish, Swedish and Finnish data should see a reduction of around 50% on the previous cost of buying data from the three exchanges separately, while end users should save around 25%.

For example, equities Level 2 data from all three exchanges, which would previously have cost €71 per user per month, will now cost €53. An annual licence fee for vendors will now cost €30,000 instead of €80,000, Belling said.