Xignite is raising a round of funding that the company expects to close within the next few weeks, Bank Innovation has learned.
Xignite’s CEO Stephane Dubois calls his company a “one-stop shop to power any financial service.” Dubois is fundraising the round — the company’s first since 2011, according to Crunchbase — to take over the distribution of financial market data.
Xignite, one of the companies leading the development of a fintech intermediary ecosystem, has $16.4 million in total funding to date, according to Crunchbase. While Dubois did not offer additional specifics into the current round, Bank Innovation expects Xignite to do a substantial raise.
The company started back in 2003 when no one knew what an API was. (Until recently, Dubois told Bank Innovation, “we said web services.”) Xignite pulls market data from the exchanges and companies such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg, but unlike those services, according to Dubois, it packages the data attractively and helps customers put it to work through its APIs. Demand for the service was slow until 2013, when APIs started taking off among FinTech startups, and Xignite was there to help.
More recently, and perhaps more importantly in the long term, the banks began to call. Banks have warmed to the cloud in the past year, to the benefit of companies such as nCino and Mambu — and of course Xignite. “A bank might spend $250,000 with us now — and we will expand that — but they will save millions of dollars by holding Bloomberg data,” Dubois said. Calls to Bloomberg’s terminals cost money every time, but Xignite’s pricing is subscription-based. So if Xignite is holding Bloomberg data, banks can avoid the terminals, which could mean significant cost savings.
There is more at stake than just cost savings, however. Xignite data may be disrupting FinTech startups by leveling the playing field for banks, helping them quickly and inexpensively build applications the way startups do. “Data in the cloud makes projects go faster,” Dubois said. “And banks can build cheaply just like startups.”
The market data feed business is a $25 billion market, Dubois said, with $15 billion of that in terminals. But the terminal business, he said, is flat and will shrink, while the cloud will continue to grow.
“In this business, everybody sells data to everybody,” Dubois said. “Nobody has everything. When we started, we had to build our data set cost-effectively by asking second-tier providers to please sell us the data. Now the tables have turned and the top players say, ‘Take it!'”
Xignite offers 1,000 different kinds of API calls and has 45 clients. The company is seeing its fastest growth outside the U.S., particularly in Asia, Dubois said. “We have the largest data set but we can do more,” he said. “In depth and breadth, and the analytics on top of it.”