Cfinancials
Big Data Technology for Investor Protection

Swiss data portal targets Germany

Reuters: Wednesday, December 15th 2010

After a successful start in its Swiss home market the financial information data portal Cfinancials is now targeting Germany and other European markets. In parallel, the current selection of free products retrievable from its site at www.cfinancials.com, currently about 450,000 items in total, will gradually be expanded so that almost all of the financial instruments available worldwide to the general public, such as structured products, funds, or stocks, will eventually be included.

Starting early next year we intend to actively market our services in Germany, France and the United Kingdom, explained the company's chief executive Michael Heijmeijer. We just hired three sales representatives for Germany. Their main goal will be to win the banks as both distribution partners and customers for additional fee based services. These services, together with advertising, are Cfinancials sources of income. Heijmeijer mentioned statistics as an important example of these types of services. We can ascertain for the banks which products are currently in demand. At the moment 95 percent of paying customers come from Switzerland. Large banks are included in this customer base, he added.

The company, founded in 2009, currently has 16 employees. It connected the first financial products onto its site at the start of October this year. We had 250,000 page views at our site in October. In November there were already 307,000. In the long term we expect to have ten million page views monthly, said Heijmeijer.

Currently about 42,000 structured products are available. By the end of December we will add another 50,000 to this total, stated Heijmeijer. All of the estimated 500,000 structured products currently offered worldwide should be available by the end of 2011. At the moment about 9,000 exchange-traded funds (ETF) are available. This total should be increased within a year to approximately 20,000. The offering should also be expanded significantly in other product classes. In two years we want to connect to all of the 9.5 million products that are already in our database, Heijmeijer said.

Cfinancials, which is located near Lausanne, draws a large part of its data from established vendors such as SIX Telekurs and Thomson Reuters. However it currently does not provide real-time prices or historical data. Instead Cfinancials provides previous business day closing prices. Cfinancials takes this data and enhances it, the company founder explained. In particular, we offer fast, simple access to financial products and we make the products comparable. That way the instruments can be sorted by a variety of criteria such as performance, asset class, or legal structure. However in the future Cfinancials intends to become more independent of the data suppliers. Our long term goal is to have direct access to both the exchanges and the product issuers in order to achieve truly global coverage, declared Heijmeijer.