Clients: Proquote: Case Study

Customer:

• Proquote Limited, a company formed at the beginning of 2000 by Daron Lee.
• Proquote beat off world class competition to win the Best Investor Innovation award at the Shares UK Equity Awards in 2001.

Market overview:

• The investment market is not an area of business that suffers from a lack of information. There are a large number of services available to stock market watchers and traders ranging from fairly inexpensive low level data sources to costly high-end trading platforms.
• At the high-end in particular, enormous consideration needs to be given not just to the overall cost of the chosen data service but also to its integration with the numerous other systems required to provide the complete enterprise trading solution.

Challenge:

• Proquote's key objective is to deliver comprehensive and accurate market information via a public network. This enables the provision of an online service to both professional and private investors at a fraction of the cost of established terminal systems making Proquote the first mass-market product in this competitive arena.
• The challenge therefore was to deliver a performant, functional and secure system that met the needs of brokers and investors but allowed cost reductions to be passed directly onto clients.
• In addition, the system needed to possess the necessary flexibility to allow integration with the multitude of complementary systems running in stock brokers, market makers, investment banks and all other target financial institutions.

Solution:

• AXL used an open standards approach to develop a system capable of overcoming the restrictions imposed by proprietary terminal-based systems. The service is fully configurable and allows users to define multiple personal or client stock lists, portfolios and tickers.The service delivers the following data types in real-time:
  • Level 1 and Level 2 prices
  • Market maker quotes and sizes for SEAQ, AIM and SEATS stocks and individual order details for all SETS traded stocks
  • AFX and RNS news
  • Global market indices including FTSE International, Dow Jones, NASDAQ, Hang Seng and Standard & Poor's
  • Forex currencies data for multi-currency operation
  Other functions include:
  • Charting facilities allowing users to view graphs over differing periods with comparisons to chosen indices, stocks or analytics
  • Alerts to inform users of specific events as personally defined

Key Activities:

• AXL was involved from the very start of the project and continues to support Proquote with maintenance and ongoing development of enhancements. Our consultancy services were initially used to define both the technology to be employed and the nature of the market data required. The development and testing of the initial service took around 12 months and this work still continues.The combination of reliable support of the live service with extension of functions through new and innovative developments is helping to keep Proquote at the forefront of market data delivery today.