Iress Expands Asia-Pacific Web Workstation

The first phase of the rollout will include five levels of bid and ask quotes, with trade and volume data, and news feeds from Dow Jones and Reuters.

Full-market depth, additional news sources and company profiles may be added later on, depending on client feedback and if Iress can find the appropriate sources, Rudy says. Iress already provides similar, broader datasets for its Australian and New Zealand data on WebIress, he says.

Challenges Ahead

Rudy says that while the vendor expects WebIress to represent a growth area in its financial information division, the group's core market data product, the Iress equity information system, could face challenges in the first half of 2009 as the global financial crisis continues.

"The full Iress product sits on trader desktops as a Windows application, and is also used in the research departments of stockbrokers," Rudy says. "That product is exposed to the number of brokers that need to access market data. If the whole market shrinks, the number of brokers is reduced, and the number of seats using our product are reduced, so it will undoubtedly have an impact." He says the vendor has budgeted for a flat growth rate in the first half of next year in its market data division.

In the meantime, Iress is pressing ahead with development of a consolidated feed of full market depth data for the Australian market that will aggregate data from the Australian Securities Exchange, along with alternative trading systems Chi-X and AXE, which are both still awaiting operating licenses from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission.

The vendor has not set a launch date for the feed as it remains dependent on the trading venues receiving regulatory approval to trade.

Wendy Mock