INTERACTIVE DATA : Launches Essential Equities Service

Interactive Data Corporation (NYSE: IDC), a leading provider of financial market data, analytics and related solutions, today announced the launch of the Essential Equities Service, a service that delivers a select set of NYSE and Nasdaq real-time market data to clients.

The Essential Equities Service is designed for use by financial institutions that do not require every tick of data, including firms that utilize the data for portfolio pricing, websites and workstations. It is designed to reduce NYSE volumes by up to 85 percent and reduce Nasdaq volumes by up to 50 percent.

The Essential Equities Service mitigates the large amount of NYSE and Nasdaq data traffic from quote updates by sending out only one update each second for quotes. By mitigating the large amount of traffic, this service can help clients minimize bandwidth requirements and associated real-time market data costs, as well as reduce the hardware footprint required to process the data. The service can also help extend the life of client applications which might otherwise require upgrades to handle the increased data volumes.

The Essential Equities Service mitigates NYSE and Nasdaq volumes through a variety of features. The one-second quote mitigation function can eliminate a significant amount of the updates that NYSE and Nasdaq generate. The service is also designed to deliver data on the composite instrument only, providing the Best Bid Offer (BBO) for each instrument while eliminating updates from regional exchanges that are off the BBO. Also, the exchange administration and control messages are removed to reduce message size and traffic.

?As annual growth rates in market data volumes continue to escalate, our clients are finding that dealing with these large volumes can be expensive and time consuming,? said Jay Kilberg, managing director of Feed Solutions, for Interactive Data. ?Our new Essential Equities Service is one of a series of Interactive Data's offerings that can help our clients to better manage growing market data volumes as well as bypass data that is not critical to their investment processes.?

The Essential Equities Service is offered by Interactive Data Real-Time Services.

About Interactive Data Corporation

Interactive Data Corporation (NYSE: IDC) is a trusted leader in financial information. Thousands of financial institutions and active traders, as well as hundreds of software and service providers, subscribe to our fixed income evaluations, reference data, real-time market data, trading infrastructure services, fixed income analytics, desktop solutions and web-based solutions. Interactive Data's offerings can help clients around the world with mission-critical functions, including portfolio valuation, regulatory compliance, risk management, electronic trading and wealth management. Interactive Data is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts and has more than 2,400 employees in offices worldwide. Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO; LSE: PSON), an international media company, is Interactive Data's majority stockholder.

For more information, please visit www.interactivedata.com.

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