Paul Humphrey

The latest funding round included Optiver as lead investor, with co-participation from existing investors FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures, IQ Capital’s Growth Fund, as well as additional investment from CTC Venture Capital.

As part of the move, Optiver has also joined BMLL’s board of investors. 

The investment comes at a time of continued accelerated growth for BMLL. Over the last 18 months, the business added more than 40 equities and futures datasets globally and today covers 98% of the MSCI All Country World Index.

BMLL has also grown its global footprint, opened a US-base and increased its client roster.

“We are thrilled to welcome Optiver as a significant shareholder and are delighted to have the ongoing support from our existing investors who have backed the latest round,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive at BMLL.

“We have an incredibly diverse team of supporting investors, with deep-seated global market and technology expertise, and we are poised to scale the business further, as we build out and scale our data feed business and futures coverage and wider product offering globally.”

Read more: BMLL expands kdb+ database offering with INQDATA technology partnership

This investment follows BMLL’s Series B round in October 2022, which secured a $26 million strategic investment from FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund. Snowflake Ventures joined the Series B round in September last year.

BMLL has previously raised $36 million through Series A and seed funding rounds.

“The high quality of BMLL’s data, their advanced analytics tools and their best-in-class team have together significantly improved our ability to generate insights that influence our strategies,” said Pat Cooney, managing director at Optiver Europe.

“We believe these benefits can extend beyond our firm and provide substantial value to other market participants as well.”

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The deal will combine BMLL’s data collection, cleansing, curation and analytics generation and INQDATA’s data ingestion, storage, management and distribution capabilities.

The pair said the joint offering will enhance performance and lower the cost of infrastructure ownership for market participants by removing the need to commit additional data science infrastructure and resources.

Instead, users will have access to historical market data within their environment, without the engineering requirements to reformat.

BMLL said mutual users can use the combined cloud architecture of BMLL and INQDATA to conduct large-scale quantitative and market microstructure analysis, test new markets, and understand trading behaviours to optimise future strategies.

The partnership is about making data available where our clients want it and in the format they want it, said BMLL chief executive Paul Humphrey in a statement.

“The level of sophistication across capital markets is constantly increasing, and with it, the demand for high-quality data to understand market behaviour and maintain a competitive edge,” he said.

“Market participants are now able to derive insights by accessing the complete BMLL API library and quantitative analysis tooling within their environment. They no longer need to dedicate precious time, budget and resources to data engineering and infrastructure. Instead, they can focus on conducting large-scale quantitative and market microstructure analyses to enhance trading outcomes.”

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The offering, which is powered by BMLL, provides T+1 consolidated best bid and offer (CBBO) data for Nordic and Baltic equity markets.

The consolidated order book consists of all lit quotes across the primary venues and MTFs that trade Nordic and Baltic securities with the corresponding original place of listing.

Nasdaq Ventures invested in BMLL in its Series B round which took place in Q4 2022. The availability of BMLL data via Nasdaq Data Link builds on top of the two firms’ existing relationship.

Read more: BMLL raises $26 million to finance North American expansion

Nasdaq Data Link is a cloud-based technology platform offering access to over 250 data sets, available via API. It provides actionable intelligence and is used by over 800,000 professionals, including analysts from data-driven organisations, hedge funds and retail brokerages.

The offering allows investment banks and brokers to identify addressable liquidity to enhance data and analytics processes and add value across research, algo optimisation, trading analytics and risk parameters.

Issuers are also able to analyse how products and listings compare to peers and competitors across different venues and currencies.

Elsewhere, systematic traders can identify simplify data collection for equity and ETP stock performance across different trading venues.

Data is made available T+1 for Nordic and Baltic markets and will be available on Nasdaq Data Link in multiple supported formats.

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AWS Marketplace is a digital catalogue with software listings from software and data vendors that helps find, test, buy and deploy products that run on AWS.

The BMLL Data Lab is a data science research sandbox which co-locates data and computes in an AWS cloud environment, offering access to full-depth order book data, enabling users to conduct analysis easily using historical Level 3, 2 and 1 data across equities, ETFs, and global futures.

Cloud adoption has seen increased focus over the last few years across the capital markets industry. Exchanges and trading venues have been in the forefront of this adoption, with expectations that they will have a knock-on effect to promote increased adoption from other participants in the longer term.

Read more: In conversation with… AWS’s John Kain

Mutual clients of BMLL and AWS have access to infrastructure and implementation services behind software and granular historical data, empowering clients with improved scalability, accelerated time to market and secure remote access.

“AWS has been our cloud computing partner for over a decade due to its unparalleled scalability and resilience. This collaboration brings significant benefits to BMLL’s clients,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

“By leveraging AWS, BMLL ingests, curates and stores large-scale data sets and generates analytics at speed and scale. Our AWS-native infrastructure allows our clients to conduct highly complex computations quickly and efficiently within their private accounts.”

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BMLL has created three data bundles targeting South African market participants using 200 metrics derived from Level 3 data spanning JSE Main, AltX and A2X, alongside every recognised exchange for dual-listing (ASX, LSE, NYSE, TSE, Nasdaq, ENXT AMS, ENXT BRU and SIX).

Among the three data bundles is BMLL’s Auction Analytics, which show any correlations between market direction and volatility in the pre-auction trading and theoretical close.

Meanwhile, South Africa Liquidity Analytics will offer a view of changes in liquidity patterns across different stocks and venues over time.

Elsewhere, BMLL’s Cross-Listed Liquidity Analytics will deliver transparency into the complexities associated with trading South African stocks outside of the country, across Europe and US complex trading regimes.

BMLL has been committed to expanding its data offering over the last few months. Most recently, BMLL made three historical datasets available via Snowflake Marketplace, helping support BMLL’s mission to improve access to order book data globally.

In December, BMLL expanded its data coverage to include the Canadian market, allowing Canadian exchange operators to analyse venue performance and liquidity dynamics against local and global peers.

This followed the completion of its China data offering, with data from every major mainland China equity exchange now available in one consistent format via the BMLL Data Lab.

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Namely, the initial datasets are Daily Classified Trades, Level 2 Quotes and Millisecond CBBO.

The move follows the two firms entering into a partnership in September last year to deliver BMLL’s data and analytics to market participants worldwide.

Read more: BMLL secures investment from Snowflake Ventures as it enters into partnership with the firm
 
According to the two firms, this collaboration improves the way in which market participants access and use large datasets, eliminating the need for in-house storage and data engineering.
 
BMLL’s data will now be delivered globally via the Snowflake Marketplace, improving time to insights for market participants across the buy-side, sell-side and trading venues.
 
Snowflake Marketplace is a cloud-agnostic platform offering a secure means for users to access, explore and trial market data.
 
“The key to democratising access to high-quality, best-in-class granular market data is to give market participants choices in how they access this data,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

“Making BMLL data available via the Snowflake Marketplace enables seamless data access at scale in addition to the currently available API and FTP options.”

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Data is now available from all major Canadian trading venues and exchanges, including the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Canadian Securities Exchange, CBOE Canada, Nasdaq Canada and Omega ATS.

This latest expansion complements BMLL’s existing US equities and ETF coverage; the addition of US FINRA ATS/OTC volumes data; and the recent addition of data from the Brazil Stock Exchange (B3) in November.

More recently, BMLL completed its China data offering, with data from every major mainland China equity exchange now available in one consistent format via the BMLL Data Lab.

The addition of Canadian data will allow exchange operators in the region to analyse venue performance and liquidity dynamics alongside performing venue comparisons against local and global peers.

“Since securing our Series B funding just over a year ago, we have worked tirelessly to expand our coverage to include Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Brazil, Tel Aviv, South Africa and now Canada,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

“Market participants need a full picture of market quality, liquidity and order dynamics to make better informed decisions on the markets they trade and the venues they operate.”

BMLL historic data brings together full depth Level 3 Data from over 75 venues, in 3 asset classes, in one harmonised format.

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This latest development means that BMLL now covers data available from Shanghai – the latest addition – as well as Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

The move comes as part of BMLL’s continued expansion of APAC equities and ETF data coverage.

In April, BMLL added Level 3 data from CBOE Japan, Jannext and Singapore Exchange, alongside existing Tokyo Stock Exchange data – which are all available within the BMLL product suite.

Elsewhere, in July, BMLL further expanded its APAC markets coverage with the addition of data from ASX and CBOE Australia.

APAC data coverage benefits both buy- and sell-side firms looking to improve trading decisions across Asia markets, as well as sell-side execution firms looking to enhance their product offering by leveraging order book data and analytics, according to BMLL.

Asian exchanges are also able to perform venue comparisons against their peers both locally and globally, to better understand their market quality or liquidity providers’ performance. 

“We continue to invest heavily in making sure that our customers can access the most granular order book data across the US, EMEA and APAC,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

“We are delighted to be able to offer the complete China data set. This is another milestone in our APAC data coverage expansion and another step on our mission to democratise access to highly granular data and analytics across global jurisdictions.”  

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The partnership will offer qualitative traders the ability to manually take granular, historical data to enhance algos and derive alpha by using the data in Exegy’s back-testing and simulation solutions.

“Accessing BMLL data now enables our clients to do strategy back-testing on high-fidelity data and execute using our real-time data. What sets BMLL apart is the way the data is sourced, saved and curated,” said David Taylor, chief executive of Exegy.

According to Exegy, up to 80% of a quant’s time is spent on data analysis, leaving only 20% to develop algos.

This partnership will help free up the time spent on the analysis process, alongside democratising access to trading intelligence.

“Firms increasingly need a deeper understanding of market shifts, liquidity dynamics and opportunities for alpha. This requires rapid access to full-depth order book historical data— engineered and formatted ready for use,” said Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL.

“BMLL’s Level 3 data and Exegy’s low latency capabilities are built on the same PCAP source data, making it easy for users to access both real-time and historical data sets with the same precision and granularity for their research.”

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Snowflake Ventures joins existing Series B investors Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ capital who raised $26 million in a funding round late last year.

Read more: BMLL raises $26 million to finance North American expansion

“We firmly believe historical data of this quality is the new gold. Previously, high-quality engineered Level 3 data was the preserve of only the world’s most sophisticated quantitative firms,” Paul Humphrey, chief executive of BMLL, told The TRADE.

“It takes a non-trivial amount of engineering to take big data and make it into usable, relevant data.  BMLL is on a mission to democratise access to this data and raise the bar on the general quality of historical content available.” 

The new partnership will eliminate the need for costly, in-house storage and data engineering, alongside accelerating time to insights – with Level 3 data stored, curated and harmonised by BMLL and delivered via the Snowflake Marketplace.

“One of the key ways in which we can democratise access to Level 3 data, is to make sure that users have a choice in how they can access it,” added Humphrey.

Snowflake’s client base will now be able to access BMLL data and analytics covering venues for equities, futures and ETFs via the Snowflake Marketplace and within their private clouds.

This will enable the ability to create enhanced, augmented and new proprietary data sets, gain actionable insights on market behaviour and enhance decision-making analysis.

“Our partnership with BMLL is an excellent example of a big data, cloud use-case for financial markets,” said Harsha Kapre, Snowflake Ventures.

“By making BMLL’s data and analytics available via the Snowflake Marketplace we deliver on increasing customer demand for core analytics and analytical workflows.”

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