Airex CEO Stephen Kuhn Discusses Company's Plans to Become the Amazon of Wall Street

Airex Markets serves as an online marketplace for applications, information and reports. The New York-based company has a roster of over 70 information providers, including Bloomberg, Markit, Nasdaq, Thomson Reuters and S&P Capital IQ. Through its Airex Market Partner (AMP) program, third parties can deploy hosted, co-branded turnkey, self-curated service of Airex's content portal, Financial AIR.

Today Airex announced Brazilian trading platform, market data and network connectivity provider CMA has joined Airex's AMP program. Waters' sibling publication Inside Market Data reported that this will allow CMA "to instantly purchase more than 300,000 products online via the platform, alongside CMA's existing proprietary research and real-time and delayed exchange data from various Latin-American and US stock, options, foreign exchange, futures, and commodities markets. CMA has been able to choose which data vendors and products are available on its portal, and has customized the look and feel of the platform."

Airex Markets CEO and chairman Stephen Kuhn explained the company's plans going forward. Mario Chuman, general manager at CMA, discusses changes in the Latin American marketplace.

Waters: For our readers that are not familiar with Airex, please provide the thinking behind Airex?

Kuhn: In short, the Airex Markets are all about bringing a modern, online marketplace like Amazon, iTunes, and Airbnb to the market for financial apps, information, and reports (Financial AIR). Today, financial information is still sold using a high-cost, direct sales model.

Firms like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, S&P, FactSet and hundreds of others are still selling digital information door-to-door. This fixed cost of sales seriously constrains the supply and demand of financial information.

The Airex Markets are frictionless digital marketplaces for our sellers to monetize their existing digital assets that are sitting on a server with a sunk cost in new markets that they can't cost-effectively reach today. And buyers now have access to products they've never had access to, can't afford, or don't even know exist in a convenient one-stop shop like Amazon or eBay.

Waters: So much like how a consumer will go to Amazon to buy their computer ink ─ or what have you ─ rather than go directly to the retailer, they would go to Airex rather than directly to the data provider?

Kuhn: Airex receives 30 percent of revenues from sales while the provider gets 70 percent. By removing the fixed cost of sales, Airex Market unleash supply and demand, allowing sellers to profitably sell any product at any level of granularity/unbundling.

We now have 300,000 individually purchasable products from over 70 sellers. And we expect to have over 1,000 sellers next year with hundreds of millions of products. Buyers ─ from retail investors with a $5K IRA to global buy-side and sell-side firms ─ can now buy exactly and only just the products they want and need.

Waters: And what is the AMP Program?

Kuhn: The AMP program is the revolutionary program that allows any company to offer their own co-branded Airex Market with these hundreds of millions of products to their customer, clients and website traffic. Think: Amazon in a box.

Our AMP Partners receive a revenue share of everything sold on their Airex Market. Today, we have over 20 AMP Partners on four continents with millions of addressable buyers. Next year, we expect to have hundreds of AMPs with tens- or hundreds-of-millions of addressable buyers.

Waters: Looking at the South American marketplace, what are the most interesting trends that you see developing that we should be keeping an eye out for?

Chuman: At the moment, we should keep an eye with the new macro-economic reforms that countries like Brazil, Colombia, Peru are putting in place to stimulate slowing economic growth in the region. These new economic packages will affect our day to day operations in the LATAM financial markets.

We also are looking very closely with the formation of a Second Exchange in Mexico, BIVA [Bolsa Institucional de Valores], with the goal to expand Mexico's financial market both in terms of efficiency and quality.