On the Street, Connections are Everything

Winning means having the right conversations with the right people at the right time.

Our vision has always been to power the email infrastructure that connects the industry, and build connections around that market-moving information. To make the markets more efficient and more meritocratic.

We’re now on a path to electronify information in the same way that trading was electronified back in the early 90s, starting in the same way the FIX protocol got going back then: by solving operational challenges.

Today, everything around information access is done manually, and the industry has accepted it as an unsolvable pain point. Have a new email address? Call or email everyone you know to tell them, one at a time. Change firms? Hope you remember everyone you had a relationship with. Have someone leave the firm? Put up a bounceback notification and hope people read it. Have a new interest or looking for information on a new topic? Do the same. It’s an operational nightmare, and just like phone-based trading drove Fidelity to seek a new way back in 1992, the operational challenges around information access will hopefully do the same in 2022.

Here at Street Context, we are in a unique position to solve these challenges: we’re the largest distributor of cross-asset class, cross-region information in the world. We have a broad, global base of users on our application. Now, we are turning that application into a network.

Evolving Email for Capital Markets

We’re excited to finally share our roadmap for the future.

First, we’re going to tackle identity management, specifically as it relates to updating and changing your email address. Street Context will allow anyone in the industry to claim and manage their identity in our network, allowing them to provide updates and replacements for contact information. If you change firms, go on garden leave, or otherwise need to update your contact information, we can help buy siders reach a significant portion of the sell side with one elegant update, saving you time and stress.

From there, we’ll provide interest management in the form of “information IOIs”. We’ll allow any profile owner to electronically manage and distribute interests in a secure, flexible, and programmatic function, giving you control over who it goes to, and what level of visibility they receive (i.e. lit vs. dark). In the same way electronic trading gave the industry flexibility around order types for trading, we want to give the industry flexibility around sharing interests for information.

Finally, we’ll bring it all together in an information matching engine, bringing the information side of the business up to speed with trading, and while we’re 30 years behind, it’s better late than never.

Introducing Street Context

You win when you’re equipped to transform your connections into a source of opportunity. That means full visibility. Meaningful insights. Actionable data. Complete context. For smarter conversations, better performance, and a revenue-driving competitive advantage– welcome the new Street Context.

Onward and upward,

– Blair Livingston