Evaluated Prices special report

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Evaluated Prices Evolve

What do evaluated price data consumers want? That's effectively what Inside Reference Data asked data operations executives in this issue's Virtual Roundtable. Participants said they tend to go to multiple sources for data. In fact, one news story in this report, about a poll Inside Reference Data conducted in the fall, notes that 87% of respondents use two or more vendors for evaluated price data (see page 7).

Education, risk and regulation are considerations for those data consumers in determining what they want from vendors. By education, Roundtable participants mean getting explanations of pricing methodologies, as Laurent Thuillier, head of asset servicing at Société Générale Securities Services, relates. "They want more
Fromt he process than just receiving a CSV file filled with figures," he says.

Standard & Poor's Capital IQ aims to offer more by giving users a look into the pricing process, says Greg Carlin, vice president, business development, S&P. "This involves showing the client components of the model and the ultimate build-out of a price," he says, adding that this includes showing what securities are being included in sophisticated sectoring plans for those pricing models.

Could reducing risk require moving away from evaluated prices entirely? Gary Pringle, vice president of global pricing operations in the worldwide securities services unit at JPMorgan, says demand for intra-day valuations is increasing. A regulatory push for greater transparency in pricing, noted by our Roundtable participants, could also change the way evaluated prices are used.

Changes in the production and use of evaluated prices are clearly afoot. These won't happen overnight, but the trends and themes spotted here should point the way to how evaluated prices will operate and what they will mean in the future.

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