How CBOE Is Keeping Up With The Fintech Revolution

With technology continuing to spread its reach across every corner of Wall Street, financial institutions are facing increased pressure in a marketplace that gets more crowded by the day.

In this marketplace it’s the consumers that have the power--to choose the trading platform, data service, and newswire that suits them best. It’s in this vein that the Chicago Board Options Exchange bought Livevol in August of last year, a clear attempt by the exchange to stay at the forefront of the intersection of finance and technology.

Livevol was founded in 2006, at a time where nobody was offering options analytics in a single source for both professional and retail traders. Livevol launched its platform to fill this void, and its suite of products has allowed them to offer everything from historical backtesting, to scanning, to volume and order flow.

Changing the focus

Initially Livevol presented its data to users via a platform-based subscription model. But, as CBOE Vice President of Business Development, and former CEO of Livevol, Catherine Clay tells it, they’ve “shifted the focus away from one size fits all into customized delivery.”

“We’re making sure the end customer is getting what they want, just when they want, and how they want it. We’ve gone from a platform delivery of our analytics and data to a more flexible and distributed mechanisms for those same things,” she said.

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That translates to customization, and a lot of it. And for Livevol that meant a complete rebuilding of their architecture to fit this new consumer.

“People are accustomed not just to getting what they want,” said Clay. “They’re getting used to the world where we anticipate what they want.”

Providing the data

For Clay, and CBOE as a whole, it all comes down to institutions like CBOE giving traders access to the best information possible, and allowing them to drill down into “granularities” in their trading.

“The client is demanding more and more intelligent tools. The key is making sure the filters we set on the data are quality and intelligent filters. Legacy systems are always hard to disrupt, but it’s necessary to allow this flexibility that the client is demanding.”

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