BT Radianz to Add Chinese Alt Datafeeds

BT Radianz plans to add new Chinese alternative datafeeds that its clients can access. To do this, the private cloud provider is looking to expand its partnerships with the local fintech community.

Yousaf Hafeez, head of business development for financial solutions at BT Radianz, says this is a largely untapped market filled with interesting vendors.

“If you look at places like Shanghai and Beijing, there are some really impressive fintechs providing alternative data such as sentiment datafeeds, imagery, economic data, or transactional data,” he says, in addition to fintechs that analyze existing datafeeds, combining economic data with prospectus data, and providing risk analysis. 

BT Radianz’s clients currently have access to a few alternative datasets in China. Some of the companies the vendor works with provide satellite imagery of locations in China to look at agricultural production. “We’ve also got someone who analyzes various social media platforms in China, looking for indications [of listed companies] of promising stock. Also there are transaction datafeeds and the flow of people using various transport systems,” he adds.  

The vendor will onboard data providers based on customer demand, and right now, datasets that help to forecast consumer demand—such as sentiment data, consumption, and transactional data—are generating a lot of interest.

Chinese License

In January 2019, BT became the first international telecommunications company to receive a nationwide license from the China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The license allows it to expand its client network and to provide market data in and out of China. 

Providing market data out of China can be both simple and complicated, Hafeez says. It is simple when trading firms only need a normalized datafeed from the Chinese exchanges. “You go and speak to one of the many market data vendors connected to the BT Radianz network, such as ICE Data, Activ, Vela, Refinitiv, Quanthouse, etc., and they can provide you with the normalized market datafeed from the Chinese exchanges very easily,” he says. 

As Hafeez puts it, it gets more “fun” when clients need raw market data from the Chinese exchanges. There are two ways to go about this. The first is connecting to a number of hubs in Hong Kong, which act as distributors of datafeeds from China, depending on what data is needed. 

“If they simply want Level-1 data, as an example, it’s simple. You can connect to one of the hubs in Hong Kong, and get the Level-1 data for many exchanges, with no issues. For Level-2 data—in the cases where firms are slightly more latency-sensitive—connecting to those hubs may not give them what they need. In those cases, firms will need to connect back to the exchange in mainland China, where allowed,” he says.

Level-1 data is also known as basic market data and includes bid/ask, last price and size, whereas Level-2 data provides additional information, such as highest and lowest bid/ask prices.

If a new trading firm wants access to Level-2 data, it would need infrastructure support that allows it to access the data, such as network, servers, and software, to look through and normalize that data. However, Hafeez says that typically, firms that want access to Level-2 data are of a certain size and already have the skillsets and tech necessary to access the raw datafeeds. 

On the flip side, for foreign exchanges wanting to distribute their data in China, BT Radianz can connect them with market data vendors in China, which can then normalize and distribute the datafeeds. 

To facilitate data transfer, BT Radianz connects directly to the exchanges in China, where permissible. Its goal is to work with all the key exchanges in China and any firms outside of China that have the right to disseminate or distribute raw market data from Chinese exchanges.  

Although China is known as being a retail investor-driven market, there’s a growing, sophisticated trading community in China, Hafeez says. These are the traders who work for hedge funds and proprietary trading firms.

He explains that many of these traders are already set up to accept and connect to raw datafeeds, and know how to process and develop feed handlers for raw datafeeds. 

“We’re seeing the data that they want to consume in China go right across the board; it’s not focused on one particular asset class or one geographic location. So we’ve seen a lot of derivative, equity, and foreign exchange data being consumed in China. It’s a very, very interesting market. And it’s data originating globally, not just in the US or the UK. It’s also from Europe, other Asian locations, and even the Middle East,” he says.