SEC Filings for Sale

Edgar Online (booth #1839), a Connecticut-based vendor specializing in communicating public-company information contained in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, has released a new solution for financial-services firms.

Edgar's SEC-filing information is now available through an XML feed, using an internally developed applications-programming interface."I don't think there is a financial institution in existence that doesn't need data from SEC filings, either in full or extracted," says Susan Strausberg, Edgar Online's chief executive officer. "Edgar filings are a prime source of U.S. public-company information, allowing the end user to have the knowledge to make the right investments and decisions."

Edgar Online's XML feed provides information from over two million Edgar documents and offers various data sets. These include normalized, fundamental financial data for public companies, such as income statements, cash flow and balance sheets, which are also available with XBRL tags.

In addition, a firm can obtain ownership data such as institutional holdings and insider ownership of officers and directors, as well as International Annual and Interim Reports and initial and secondary public-offering data.

The service also provides search and organizational components to enable a user to jump to the appropriate area of a company's filings. Strausberg says that while Edgar has specialized in delivering this type of information, it is the delivery channel itself that makes this service unique. Until now, Edgar Online has focused on desktop delivery through its primary offering of EDGARpro, she explains.

However, the API will be geared towards mid- to large-tier financial firms looking to access specific portions of the SEC filings in specific formats, and incorporate that information into a variety of internal applications in real time. "In the case of the API, our motto is 'less is more,'" she says. "People may not want to have the whole fleet of data sets offered in EDGARpro. They can mix and match based on what their specific users need to have. It's about delivering the data however the customer wants it."

The API will allow firms to utilize the XML feed in various ways, according to Edgar Online. For example, firms can retrieve financials in spreadsheet form to enable integration with proprietary applications. The vendor says this is useful for equity researchers, as well as investment managers to examine credit risk and investment compliance.

In addition to integration with internal applications, the service can be utilized on intranets for internal display for employees on an enterprise level, as well as displayed via secure Internet Web sites for a firm's most valuable customers, says the vendor.

While Strausberg concedes that SEC filings are public information and, therefore, available to all market-data vendors, she claims that there is a benefit to Edgar Online's domain expertise. "Most purveyors of aggregated financial information would include some excerpted or extracted information," she says. "But if you want a deeper and fully functioning product, you go to the specialist."

The service, which is being launched today, will offer the API and either one or multiple login IDs, without the necessity of individual subscriptions, according to the vendor.

The service cost will vary, depending on the number of data sets employed, functionality utilized, and size of enterprise. However, the price tag is hardly an inordinate investment for the value proposition, says Strausberg. "The information that we deliver helps people make money," she says, "and that is the end game for people in financial-services -- to make money."