WFIC 2017: Burton-Taylor Rebrands, Preps Expanded Research Focus

In addition to Burton-Taylor’s three core areas of coverage—market data, exchanges, and media intelligence—the firm will add anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC), and indexes as new focus areas, and expects to publish its first report on AML/KYC within the coming weeks, and to begin publishing reports focused on the indexes business by year-end.

“We wanted to go deeper into the verticals we currently serve, such as market data and exchanges, but we also realized that there are markets that were being under-served, which—with investment to properly staff our functions—we could address, satisfy that audience, while expanding into other areas,” says Douglas B. Taylor, managing partner of Burton-Taylor.

The triangular shape of the firm’s new logo reflects these three core areas, replacing its former logo of a globe comprised of dots representing data points, though retaining a similar color swatch.

The firm will still publish reports on an ad-hoc basis, but will develop a full schedule of reports to be published throughout the year, which it will sell on a one-off basis as it has traditionally done, and will also introduce various tiers of annual subscription fees for clients to access all its reports.

In addition, Burton-Taylor plans to step up its existing presence in market data cost benchmarking consulting, where it compares a firm’s expenditure to an anonymous cross-section of its peers to produce individual and confidential one-off reports for firms that rank their spend and efficiency against their industry peers. “We’ll start with a blank slate and let them define what they want, and what they think is missing from existing benchmarking offerings,” Taylor says.

This data—anonymized to remove any identifying information—will also help inform the firm’s industry-wide spend reports.

“We do some benchmarking work now, and in the past we have hired consultants with expertise around the specific area we’re looking at,” Taylor says. But for future projects, the firm is recruiting two more analysts to serve alongside Taylor, Andy Nybo—who joined Burton-Taylor in March—and Chris Porter, director of Porter Walford Consulting, who works full-time for Burton-Taylor on a long-term consulting contract.

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