Cfinancials
Big Data Technology for Investor Protection

World premiere of Cfinancials in Geneva

L'AGEFI: Friday, May 7th 2010

INFORMATION. The financial products portal unveils its potential.

The portal to the world of financial products opened on Wednesday evening to a selection of potential customers. A presentation of the current site was made, which offers access to data for 6.9 million financial products, and of the new version with 9.5 million products, which will become available in June. Fritz Hediger, head of international sales at SIX Telekurs, Cfinancials’ main data provider, stressed that the site makes access to international financial information much easier for those participating in the market, thereby contributing to market transparency.

While the current platform already offers numerous options for multi-criteria searches and impressive speed, the new one has an even more sophisticated structure. Having accomplished the first stage of creating a portal, Cfinancials is now becoming a powerful comparison tool, explains Michael Heijmeijer, the founder and CEO.

Cfinancials has grown up, with a more targeted presentation of some 400 data items per product and a plethora of comparisons on the basis of all the products sharing the same data field. It will offer performance graphs, over periods from one week to ten years. It will even be possible to create company information sheets, with a summary, data comparisons, graphs, dates of recent press releases and relevant news items. However, extraction possibilities will be intentionally limited: we will leave this area to our partners (SIX Telekurs, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones and Interactive Data Inc.). This is only logical for a platform that has never denied that it was inspired by Google and cloud computing, i.e. the replacement of local centralized storage by access to data spread over multiple servers.

Michael Heijmeijer and his team also plan to develop the possibility of customizing the basic platform to clients' requirements. This possibility emerged as being of considerable interest during the conference presentation. The customized version will be created by Cfinancials on the basis of parameters determined by the client, explained Mr Heijmeijer.

His site is also a way for non-quoted companies to make themselves known to potential investors, for a fee. The idea is to give these companies a chance to present themselves in 30 seconds. His own company benefited from such support: It was Private Equity that enabled the creation of Cfinancials.

His vision has not changed since the project was launched in 2006: The future of financial information lies in its being public and free. Basically, there should not be any secrets. With this in mind, he intends to gradually open up the site, with the free part being funded by the five streams of advertising revenue (world of financial products, promotional, premium and institutional services, and private equity), first to selected customers, and then to everyone.