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| | | | Marcel Kalse | | Director of Retail
Alex Beleggersbank and BinckBank
Amsterdam, The Netherlands | | | Before it was sold to BinckBank in 2007, Alex Beleggersbank was a leading online broker in the Netherlands that served individual investors. |
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| | Seek simplicity
Scope and simplicity—when it comes to a real-time market data feed, that’s what matters to one of the largest investment banks in the Netherlands. And that’s what Morningstar Quotes™ delivers. Marcel Kalse helped launch Alex Beleggersbank, now owned by BinckBank. “Alex was the market leader for private investors in the Netherlands, and BinckBank was number two,” describes Kalse.
Keep the data flowing
The service that Alex offers “do-it-yourself” investors is built on three technical pillars: a website, order management system, and market data. “Without market data we have a big, big problem,” explains Kalse. “So we invest a lot of money to keep those three pillars on a high level of uptime.” | | Access global markets at once Broad coverage is essential for Kalse. “That’s the reason we use a single market data provider—so we only have to make one connection to receive data from 25 different markets,” he says. Costs and reliability of both data and technology are also crucial factors. Morningstar Quotes provides a special data “netting” functionality that allows Alex to either take in the full feed with as many as 130,000 messages per second or a buffered feed, helping mitigate massive volumes of market data.
Deal with one reliable company
Alex first received its real-time data feed in 2000 from Tenfore Systems Limited. Kalse was already familiar with Morningstar when the company acquired Tenfore in 2008. | |  | | | | “I think this is a good step for Tenfore and Morningstar. At Alex, we use Morningstar fund data and the Morningstar Rating™,” says Kalse. “Morningstar is a big, reliable company. The acquisition gives us a lot of confidence.” | | |
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