Anya van den Berg, Vice President – Data and Analytics at Market Data + Services, Deutsche Börse Group discusses the German exchange’s foray into analytics.
Describe your own professional background and current role/responsibilities at Deutsche Börse?
I have 15 years’ experience working in the data and technology space within the financial sector and was recently promoted to lead the analytics sales team globally at Deutsche Börse. The team works closely with buy-side and sell-side firms globally to gain an edge with our unique product offerings.
What is the overarching strategy of the analytics department at Deutsche Börse
Our analytics department within the Market Data + Services unit at Deutsche Börse sits in a very fortuitous position. We have a great team of data scientists, whose sole function and purpose is to develop meaningful proprietary datasets based on the data from all of our exchanges, venues and divisions, including Eurex, Xetra, 360T, Clearstream, ISS, and Crypto Finance. These datasets are then packaged and aggregated into ingestible offerings for buy-side and sell-side firms and helps them to optimise their trading strategies accordingly. That is the predominant goal of the department – to put together data and analytics that have a unique character and provide special insights. We have a vast amount of proprietary data, and we intend to use them in order to develop the products that make the most impact for our customers.
How have Deutsche Börse analytics product offerings evolved over time?
Our department is relatively young with the first product offerings launching in 2018. We had a tier-one bank come to us at this time, asking for net traded flow, aggregated into meaningful market participant groups captured from our Eurex T7 network. We built the product now known as Eurex Flow Insights, delivered it to this end customer, and released it to the rest of the market. We were not sure how well it would fare, but it has completely taken off for not only other sell side institutions but quant buy-sides as well. This has been due to the unique market sentiment of the daily data but also the 20 years’ of history, dating back to 2002.
We’ve expanded the offering by adding Eurex Open Interest and increasing the daily coverage from 60 instruments to 490 instruments. To answer your question, the evolution of this product in particular has gone through five or six incarnations, which comes down to customer feedback and customer demand. All our offerings follow a similar development journey to ensure we are maximizing the direct value to our customers. It is truly exciting to be part of an organization that develops products hand in hand with the industry, that you cannot find anywhere else in the marketplace.
What are notable 2022 trends at the exchange?
We’ve seen a huge influx in demand for futures and options data. The Eurex Open Interest product, which we launched as an enhanced offering to Eurex Flow Insights in January, has snowballed. Much of that comes down to the current macro situation – the pandemic, Brexit, the volatility around the conflict in Ukraine, inflation. The derivatives market allows customers to hedge and properly manage risk. It is therefore really important for customers to have that security and reassurance when they trade in volatile times. This is why we believe we have seen an enormous uptake in our Open Interest-specific futures and options data.
What important partnerships/collaborations have you announced this year?
One worth highlighting is our co-operation with CME Group. Our cloud-based A7 Analytics platform provides granular, nanosecond-precise order book data. Up until a few months ago, that was only on our internal markets – Eurex, Xetra, and EEX. However, we now include CME Group data within A7, to deliver order book data reconstructed. It’s a plug-and-play solution where you can back-test strategies in the cloud, across both CME Group and Deutsche Börse markets.
It’s a compelling offering as it shortens development life cycles – customers can start testing their strategies and algos in the cloud immediately, without having to buy order book data or have the in-house expertise to reconstruct the order book. They can use our cloud-based solution quickly, easily, and at a competitive price, rather than needing huge infrastructure on their side.
We have also just announced our new partnership with crypto market data provider Kaiko, where we will be providing real-time and historical tick level data for all crypto exchanges and all digital assets covered by the provider, with the aim of expanding our product offering and driving transparency throughout the digital asset industry.
What makes Deutsche Börse analytics unique? How is it differentiated from other products in the marketplace?
We offer best of breed data across a broad array of asset classes and markets. The raw data is generated on our markets which are developed and fostered to provide a broad reflection of different market participants and liquidity streams, and as such providing for true market prices. The data is reliable and correct and down to millisecond or nanosecond levels. On top, we have over 20 years’ history on a number of these products, so the depth is compelling. Not only that but the data is highly accurate. Our T7 trading environment, the number of trading members we have, our products and services, are all best of breed.
How does Deutsche Börse future-proof its offerings?
We listen to our customers and act accordingly. Our content development team is very agile and can enhance or develop a new product quickly when there is clear demand from the industry. If we do not have the data in-house, we then look to other third parties to partner up with to ensure our customers can leverage our technology alongside a co-operation with a data provider or external exchange. Our partnership with Kaiko is a direct result of these conversations, where our customers have asked for increased transparency in the digital asset space.
