Setting a New Standard for Data Quality
BMLL secures $21m strategic investment
Paul Humphrey, Chief Executive Officer, BMLL
1 October 2024
Today marks an important milestone in our growth journey. We are proud to announce that we have closed a $21m funding round and we have secured strategic investment from Optiver, who led this latest investment round and is joining our board of investors alongside FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures, IQ Capital’s Growth Fund and Snowflake Ventures. In addition, CTC Venture Capital, the venture capital arm of Chicago Trading Company also joined this latest round.
We have incredibly diverse backers and partners, who believe in our mission to democratise access to high-quality, granular order book data for market participants globally. I’d like to thank them all for their ongoing support.
What’s more, Optiver’s investment underscores the premium quality of our data. Sophisticated firms like Optiver have a deep appreciation of the crucial role granular, accurate and complete order book data plays in a highly competitive trading environment. The fact that Optiver is integrating our historical market data into its trading environment speaks volumes; it’s a massive vote of confidence in our engineering capabilities and our data normalisation processes. And our team deserves a huge ‘thank you’ for delivering on this day-in, day-out.
The message to the industry is clear: we’re setting a new standard for data quality
The days of having to put up with bad quality data and using 80% of your quant’s valuable time to cleanse data are over. When the world’s most sophisticated market makers are choosing BMLL’s historical data, owning these types of datasets is no longer a USP. Firms now differentiate themselves by what they do with the data, rather than by owning and engineering it.
Here’s an insight into how we got here and what we’re planning to do next
Over the last two years, we have accelerated our expansion on multiple levels - from opening a US presence to adding more than 40 exchange data sets and growing our engineering team - and are now set to continue on that journey.
Data coverage is global:
We are proud that we now cover 98% of the MSCI All Country World Index; that’s more than 100 trading venues across global Equities, ETFs and Futures.
Data quality is why we win:
Being ‘Golden’ in Level 3 data on a global scale was always the goal. This global coverage then enabled us to address the shortcomings of Level 1 and Level 2 data historically provided by real-time providers.
For decades, the historical market data industry was the ‘Exhaust’ of the wider market data industry. It represented a single-digit percentage of providers’ revenues and was often given away. It received little to no investment as those traditional providers sought revenue from the pre-trade and real-time world.
That strategy doesn’t work in a quantitative and algorithm-driven environment. Having gaps, spikes, and flaws in your data from all the market data incumbents doesn’t cut it anymore. We have now solved that problem. The quality of our Level 1 and Level 2 data is unmatched by any other vendor; we are competing with heavy-weight incumbents and we are gaining great traction.
We’re meeting our customers where they need us to be
We listen to our customers and we’re meeting them within their trading environment. Our global partnerships are a crucial step in making our data accessible where and when clients need it. They can now get a clear picture of liquidity dynamics to improve execution outcomes. Our latest collaborations include Nasdaq Data Link, AWS Marketplace, Exegy, QuantHouse, INQDATA, ARTEX and CCData. All have selected BMLL as their historical data partner.
Our team brought home the gold
All this was made possible by our excellent team of data engineers, quants, sales and marketing team who play a crucial role in our success. My amazing team has spent years in the technicalities and the minutiae of our craft, to be no less than the world’s best-in-class source of historical data. We do detail and we do it well! Allow me a moment to be very proud and share in this wonderful recognition with you.
What’s next? Futures and more.
Market participants are getting more and more sophisticated; they tell us that they want more data from us, to fuel their cross-asset trading strategies and performance. In a world where quant resources are scarce, they need data and insights that are ready to use.
When it comes to futures, BMLL already has all of CME, Eurex, ICE across all asset classes in one harmonised format. Our futures data coverage expansion will definitely continue so watch this space! The big news is we have added nanosecond unconflated OPRA options data going back 5 years! Big data doesn’t frighten my team, it’s what we do, but this was BIG! Stay tuned as we turn this data into a series of conflated feeds, mapped to our real-time partners’ formats, and - over time - create a series of new products from it.
Our products will be enhanced: we will add all these data sets into our product offering to ensure clients can access the data within our research sandbox - the BMLL Data Lab, or delivered via the BMLL Data Feed, or viewed within the market microstructure visualisation platform, BMLL Vantage. All of this represents a non-trivial amount of data engineering
We will continue to seek out new partnerships with data distributors and also organisations who build their product offering on top of BMLL’s Level 3, 2 and 1 data sets taking our quality products to a broader audience. This includes exchanges, data providers, hedge funds, quants and more.
We are honoured to be trusted by global exchange groups, T1 investment banks, market makers, hedge funds, regulators and the academic community. Our data and analytics empower them with actionable insights and a deep understanding of how markets behave, so they can make better-informed decisions on the markets they trade and the venues they run.
We look forward to working alongside our investors to fuel the next phase in our growth for BMLL and continue our mission to bring high-quality, granular order book data to market participants worldwide.