Arcontech Touts Excelerator Page Displays

UK-based data technology vendor Arcontech has introduced a new version of its Excelerator add-in for Microsoft Excel that includes support for page-based feeds of real-time data from interdealer brokers, which could provide a low-cost alternative to premium market data terminals for displaying broker prices, officials tell Inside Market Data.

The new version of Excelerator—which enables users to receive real-time data and contribute prices to data distribution networks from spreadsheets—can display price data from brokers in separate pop-out windows, and allows clients to manipulate individual data items within spreadsheets.

Arcontech developed the page-based displays to serve as a basic interface of configurable pages displaying real-time broker data or internally-published content for user firms looking to cut costs by replacing more costly terminals. “Working together with some of our prospects, we formulated the idea of these broker pages that pop up out of the Excel spreadsheets, making it a low-end market data terminal,” says Arcontech chief executive Andrew Miller.

Although the broker displays do not contain any historical charts or interactive functionality, Excelerator allows users to “shred” the page-based data to extract individual data fields, which can then be streamed into Excel for further real-time analysis. Once in Excel, clients can use the data to perform a wide range of functions and develop their own analytics, Miller says.

For example, if a client has already written a macro in Excel that updates the spreadsheet by placing price changes in new cells to create a historical time series, “we just facilitate that—so whatever they have done, we will work with it,” Miller says. “All we are providing is the ability to display the pages in a nice way, and then to pull that data to the Excel spreadsheet in real time.”

The cost of migrating to the new displays is mitigated by Excelerator’s easy integration with firms’ existing Thomson Reuters Enterprise Platform for Real-Time (formerly known as RMDS) data distribution infrastructures. “Clients can load our product and nothing needs to change—it is a very simple packaging job for the technology people,” Miller says.

The new page-based displays, which can be launched from within Excel, allow users to configure their desktop display by sizing and arranging each window as needed, and also include support for background and foreground colors, and full ANSI (American National Standards Institute) character attribute display, sourced via a special API, to ensure that the page displays render data accurately and in its intended format, Miller says.