The data previously was available on an ad hoc basis to some clients, such as central banks, but now is available on a wide-scale basis, according to James O'Hagan, EBS market data product manager. "The demand for a product like this has increased following the launch last summer of AI, an interface for model trading aimed at hedge funds," he says.

The data includes currency identifiers and time stamps; one-second time slices of EBS Best Regular, which records the highest bid and lowest offer available in the market for a currency pair on the EBS Spot system; and one-second time slices of the paid/given rate, which is the lowest and highest rates dealt within the time slice. "Anyone doing probability or forecasting or price movements or any other type of modeling would use this," O'Hagan says, as it helps them with their back testing.

O'Hagan explains that EBS Data Mine uses actual transactional data. "There are other data sellers of historical data, but that is pulled together from various sources, and it's a difference between indicative data verses transactional," he contends. According to O'Hagan, the majority (75 percent) of interested clients have been banks and the other 25 percent of interest has come from the professional trading community and hedge funds.