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BMO Financial Group Wins American Financial Technology Award

Xignite

Deployment of Xignite Enterprise for Cloud-Based Data Distribution Solution Named “Best Cloud Initiative”

BMO Financial Group (TSX, NYSE: BMO) and Xignite, the leading provider of market data cloud solutions, announced today that BMO has implemented Xignite Enterprise, a cloud-based data distribution solution that helps large financial institutions centralize, distribute and optimize access to market and reference data licensed by Bloomberg and other vendors. BMO’s deployment of Xignite Enterprise - dubbed BMO Skyway - was recognized as the industry’s Best Cloud Initiative at the 2014 American Financial Technology Awards ceremony on December 8th, 2014 in New York City.

BMO uses Xignite Enterprise to distribute market data licensed from several vendors throughout the organization using a private, branded on-demand market and reference data cloud. The solution helps BMO reduce market data expenses by eliminating duplicate data usage between departments and across vendors, while also driving accountability and compliance through its embedded entitlement controls and detailed usage tracking metrics. In addition, the data is readily available via REST APIs to help BMO power next-generation initiatives in several strategic areas.

Managing the volume, distribution, reconciliation and compliant use of market data feeds is increasingly becoming a challenge within the capital markets and banking sectors. Market data groups struggle to eliminate data silos and ensure that data is utilized effectively across divisions and departments. At the same time, new initiatives around digital wealth management and other key areas are pushing large financial institutions to look at not only reducing costs, but also increasing the firm’s ability to quickly respond to emerging technologies coming from Silicon Valley and other fast-emerging fintech areas.

“We subscribe to disparate feeds from many market data vendors,” said Rich Weston, Director and Global Head of Market Data at BMO. “Our data management team wanted to enhance our abilities to see how and where our market data was being consumed. We also wanted an architecture that could help us address the challenges and opportunities ahead, delivering improved time-to-market for new initiatives while effectively managing costs. BMO Skyway gives us that.”

Built on Xignite Enterprise, BMO Skyway centralizes and caches market and reference data collected from vendors in the cloud and provides employees and downstream systems with easy access to that data. Xignite Enterprise supports both native FTP format emulators for seamless and rapid migration, and next-generation REST-based APIs to fuel innovation. BMO now has greater storage capabilities, as well as access to user metrics and authentication functionality that ensures licensing compliance and helps optimize total cost of ownership (TCO) across multiple data vendors.

“Xignite created a centralized access point, which allows us to expose our catalogue of market pricing and reference data without significant re-engineering costs,” said Weston. “Our users can pull data into portals, proprietary in-house systems and applications in a matter of minutes because the data is easy to find and access. Our cost transparency has improved significantly and as a result, we can now model how our data is being used and reallocate the total cost to deliver and maintain the market data we provide as a service.”

“Easy and timely access to market data is going to be critical to the financial services industry’s ability to re-invent itself in the post-credit-crisis era,” said Stephane Dubois, Xignite CEO and founder. “Innovative organizations are realizing that they cannot entertain the status quo. They must take advantage of new technologies, such as the public cloud and APIs, to knock billions of dollars off their cost infrastructure while gaining the speed they need to compete in the new world.”

“BMO Skyway now gives us the capability to increase the value of our market and reference data resources,” said Weston. “But it is even more significant that we are now armed to innovate at the speed of a Silicon Valley startup.”

The American Financial Technology Awards, hosted by Waters magazine and WatersTechnology.com, recognize excellence in the deployment and management of financial technology within the asset management and investment banking communities. The “Best Cloud Initiative” award recognizes buy-side and sell-side firms, as well as exchanges, that demonstrate the greatest return on investment by deploying an internal cloud or integrating one or more third-party cloud environments.

About Xignite Xignite, Inc. is the leading provider of market data cloud solutions. Xignite makes sourcing and integrating real-time and reference market data into apps and devices easy and more cost-effective than alternative data feeds. The Silicon Valley-based company fuels FinTech innovation by powering web sites and apps for more than 1000 financial services, media, software and corporate clients, including FinTech standouts Betterment, Future Advisor, Personal Capital, SigFig, Stocktwits, Wealthfront, and Yodlee. The company’s Xignite Enterprise solution also powers private data distribution solutions for financial institutions, exchanges, and market data vendors including BMO, NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Technologies, and SIX Financial Information. For more information, visit http://www.xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.

About BMO Financial Group Established in 1817 as Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group is a highly diversified financial services organization based in North America. The bank offers a broad range of retail banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to more than 12 million customers. BMO Financial Group had total assets of $589 billion and more than 46,000 employees at October 31, 2014.

RECENT NEWS

Partners with ESG Book to Drive Investor Sustainability Engagement


SAN MATEO, Calif.
, April 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced the launch of a new Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data API in partnership with ESG Book, a global leader in ESG data and technology. Xignite's brokerage, wealth, and media customers can now increase user engagement and retention with state-of-the-art sustainability trading products.

As ESG investment has gone mainstream, today's digital investors, institutional investors, and corporations alike require ESG data to help them answer questions that range from a company's workforce diversity to its commitment to a net zero future. In this context, brokers and wealth managers can use ESG data to increase client engagement around their portfolios and differentiate their offerings in a very fragmented marketplace.

"We are thrilled to extend our highly scalable and advanced API platform to include ESG Book's real-time sustainability dataset. With the recent SEC announcement of proposals for climate disclosure, the momentum for sustainability data in the U.S. just keeps on building. If you do not offer ESG data and portfolio analytics to your clients today, you will run into growth and retention challenges," said Stéphane Duboi, the CEO of Xignite.

Dr Daniel Klier, CEO of ESG Book, said: "As capital markets transition towards a more sustainable, net-zero future, demand for accessible, comparable and transparent ESG data has never been higher. We are delighted to be partnering with Xignite, a global leader in API solutions, to deliver our real-time ESG data products to clients at both speed and scale through the latest cloud technology."

Xignite's new ESG API is designed to fast track the launch of ESG powered products. Transparent, well-structured and easy to understand ESG datasets eliminate the need for robust in-house ESG expertise. Advanced screener endpoints further simplify development by eliminating the need to maintain a database.

XigniteGlobalESG API covers a comprehensive universe of public companies domiciled in North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America. In addition to ESG scores, this API provides Global Compact scores, involvement data, temperature scores, and raw emissions data.

About Xignite

Xignite is the leading provider of market data API solutions to brokers, wealth managers, and the tech firms who serve them. Xignite has been disrupting the market data industry from Silicon Valley since 2003 when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Today, more than 700 firms use Xignite's APIs more than half a trillion times a month to deliver high-value data to digital investors. Visit xignite.com or follow us on Twitter @xignite.

About ESG Book

ESG Book is a global leader in sustainability data and technology. Through a cloud-based platform, ESG Book makes sustainability data more widely available and comparable for all stakeholders, enables companies to be custodians of their own data, provides framework-neutral ESG information in real-time, and promotes transparency. It counts many of the world's leading financial organisations among its clients, which collectively manage over $120 trillion in assets. www.esgbook.com

04/12/2022

Sales Up 50%. API Volumes Now Exceed Half a Trillion per Month.

Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced that 2021 was a banner year for its business. Xignite experienced more than 50% growth in new client bookings over 2020. Most of this growth was fueled by heavy demand from new brokerage and wealth management applications as more firms entered the business. Xignite also saw a 53% increase in API consumption to a whopping half a trillion requests a month - driven mainly by increased activity from digital investors as they consumed more and more data during the pandemic.

The Digital Investor Revolution was created by the convergence of zero-cost trading, fractional shares, working from home, the pandemic, and the emergence of a new and more powerful generation of retail investors. This has created significant momentum in trading and wealth management, primarily US-based equity and options trading. And it has fueled the entrance of a considerable number of new prominent players in the field, especially embedded finance providers. It all came to light in early 2021 with the Reddit and Gamestop phenomenon. But it has not proven to be short-lived. The transformation could be profound. Indeed Xignite saw its momentum accelerate in Q4-2021, with bookings growth exceeding 310% over the same quarter in 2020.

“Xignite is one of the oldest and most scalable commercial API infrastructures globally. It’s not a surprise that our clients have grown to rely on us for their mission-critical business needs,” says Stephane Dubois, Xignite’s CEO and Founder. “It’s not only the mind-numbing volumes that we have to deal with,” adds Dubois, “It’s also the 4-nine+ level of availability we deliver day in and day out coupled with the awesome market data quality and the high touch responsiveness of our support teams. These metrics matter to large embedded finance firms entering the business or legacy firms migrating to the cloud. They spend tens of millions of dollars entering the business. They don’t want to see it evaporate because of poor data quality or API availability.” 

About Xignite

Xignite powers the investing apps and services that enable millions of people to manage their portfolios and trade stocks from a phone or tablet with the industry’s best financial market data APIs. We help more than 700 fintech trading, investment, and analytics firms like Robinhood, SoFi, and Betterment provide digital investors with the market data they need, such as real-time stock prices and company news. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.

03/10/2022

Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced the launch of a new cryptocurrency data API. Xignite’s brokerage, wealth, and media customers can now increase the value and stickiness of their services to digital investors by taking advantage of the depth and breadth of data offered by this API.

Investment in cryptocurrencies has increased dramatically over the last few years and has proven to draw new investors into the world of trading. As a result, brokerage companies are trying hard to make buying, selling, and holding Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), and other cryptocurrencies as easy as possible for their clients. The XigniteCrypto API is the first to bring together a vast universe of cryptocurrency information alongside the equity, ETF, and option data brokers and fund managers need to offer high-quality services to their clients. It also provides the depth of functionality required for them to engage customers and drive trading activity

“Cryptocurrencies tend to operate in their own world,” said Stephane Dubois, CEO, and Founder of Xignite. “This means that if you want to offer integrated equity, option, and crypto trading or analytics for your clients, you are going to have to cobble up a lot of heterogeneous data from many disparate sources, and that’s a pain,” adds Dubois. “With our new crypto API, you get the depth of coverage, the quality, and the reliability across all asset classes you need to grow your business - all in one integrated solution.”

Xignite’s new cryptocurrency API, XigniteCrypto, provides real-time and historical quotes for over 900 cryptocurrencies, including coins and tokens. It includes unique API endpoints that help firms engage digital investors, using the data and tools they need to make crypto trading decisions, including price alerts, historical charting, currency conversion, and cryptocurrency news.

About Xignite

Xignite is the leading provider of market data API solutions to brokers, wealth managers, and the tech firms who serve them. Xignite has been disrupting the market data industry from Silicon Valley since 2003, when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Since then, Xignite has continually taken advantage of new technologies to help its clients grow their business and serve their customers better by using financial market data effectively. Today, more than 700 firms use Xignite’s APIs more than half a trillion times a month to deliver high-value data to digital investors. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.

 

02/15/2022

Xignite, Inc., a cloud-based market data distribution and management solutions provider for financial services and technology companies, announced a new Vendor of Record service for clients subscribing to real-time and delayed market data. The new service vastly simplifies the administration and reporting required by exchanges and often eliminates the need to pay redistribution fees, potentially saving clients thousands of dollars a month.

As an approved Vendor of Record, also called a Service Facilitator, Xignite can redistribute real-time and delayed equities and options pricing data from Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA), OTC Markets (OTCM), and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). 

Adhering to the complex compliance guidelines required by exchanges is extremely difficult for investment advisers, financial advisers, or order management software providers that need to display real-time or delayed data. Each exchange has its own unique set of regulations and compliance requirements, and clients need to prove that they have control over who receives the data, in what format, and for what use case. Xignite’s Vendor of Record service eliminates the administrative burden of tracking these complex compliance requirements.

The new service utilizes Xignite’s cloud-native Entitlements and Usage Microservices to give firms complete control and transparency of their data consumption and usage. Xignite provides data entitlements, usage tracking, and exchange reporting across various data sets, users, and applications to ensure exchange compliance. Xignite’s new service sometimes eliminates the need to pay expensive redistribution fees. Exchange fees for display data, regardless of the number of users, can cost upwards of $10,000 per month. These high fees are especially difficult for smaller financial firms with just a few real-time data users.  

“Maneuvering through the maze of required compliance policies, entitlements, usage tracking, and reporting requirements, and being subjected to frequent audits is no easy feat,” said Vijay Choudhary, Head of Product for Xignite. “Xignite’s mission is to “Make Market Data Easy.” Today’s announcement is another step towards this. We are taking away the administrative burdens and complexity of licensing market data and allowing our clients the freedom to focus on their investment and trading strategies and building innovative products.”

Xignite’s Vendor of Record service is available for professional users with internal and display-only use cases. The service is available now as an add-on service for subscribers of our real-time and delayed equities and options pricing data APIs. These include:

XigniteGlobalOptions

XigniteGlobalQuotes

XigniteGlobalRealTime

XigniteGlobalRealTimeOptions

XigniteNASDAQLastSale

About Xignite

Xignite has been disrupting the financial and market data industry from its Silicon Valley headquarters since 2003 when it introduced the first commercial REST API. Since then, Xignite has continually refined its technology to help Fintech and financial institutions get the most value from their data. Today, more than 700 clients access over 500 cloud-native APIs to build efficient and cost-effective enterprise data management solutions. Visit xignite.com or follow on Twitter @xignite.

09/21/2021