When a custom feed is the right product
Most desks are well served by the standard Daily Signal API or the Bulk Datasets product, they cover the 41-check stability taxonomy, regional and SIC peer-set distributions, and the full UK iXBRL population on a daily cadence. Custom feeds are for the cases where standard isn’t enough:
- Bespoke factor combinations. You want a single field, “Zombie + Threshold Crossing within 12 months”, or “Ghost-Tech with director-resignation cluster”, that combines multiple signal families into one tradable signal. We define it once with you, and it ships daily.
- Watchlist-tight cuts. You want the daily cut filtered to your exact universe, your top-50 vendors, your fund’s UK portfolio companies, the buy-box for a specific origination mandate, with peer-set comparables computed against the population, not the watchlist.
- Non-standard refresh cadences. You need it intra-day rather than nightly, or weekly with a Friday close, or once a quarter aligned to your reporting cycle. We tune the pipeline to your operational rhythm.
- Schema customisation. Your data team has a strict column contract, specific field names, units, data types, joinable keys, and the standard schema doesn’t match. We write the cut to your schema, not ours.
Every Custom Feed engagement is delivered against a written spec we agree up front, with sample rows for sign-off before the full feed ships.
What we typically build
A short tour of recent Custom Feed engagements, anonymised but representative:
- A long/short equity fund wanted a single five-year point-in-time Parquet feed combining Real-Time Margin Shift, Ghost-Tech detection and Director-Resignation clusters, joined to their existing equity-master via SEDOL. We delivered it against a Snowflake share with no look-ahead bias, validated under their research-compliance review.
- A FTSE-250 procurement team wanted a daily CSV cut to their top-200 Tier-1 vendor list, with the Virtual Office cluster grade and the Filing Stability score on each row. We pipe it into their Coupa instance via an SFTP drop at 06:00 GMT every business day.
- A mid-market PE origination desk wanted a weekly XLSX cut of every UK private company crossing the £10.2M turnover threshold for the first time in a 90-day window, filtered to four specific SIC codes within the £5M-£50M revenue band. We deliver it via email Monday at 07:00 GMT, four hours before their pipeline meeting.
- A specialty insurance underwriter wanted the SIC peer-set median margin and current ratio for every UK active filer, flattened into a single 5M-row CSV that drops into their pricing model overnight. Refresh nightly via S3 push.
The common thread: every engagement starts with a use-case conversation, not a price list. Curious what the underlying company-level signal looks like before it’s cut into a feed? See a live profile: Magrock Limited, a £91.5m Kent construction firm tracked against the same forty-one-check taxonomy.
How we work
The typical Custom Feed engagement runs in three phases:
- Spec week. A dedicated solutions engineer maps your use case against the iXBRL tag inventory, drafts the schema, and ships sample rows against the last 30 days of filings. You sign off before any production work starts.
- Build sprint. We run the spec against the full population, validate against your reference cases, and stress-test the pipeline at your real refresh cadence. Typically 1-3 weeks depending on factor complexity.
- Production handover. We connect the feed to your delivery channel of choice (S3, SFTP, Snowflake share, webhook, direct Postgres replication) and run it for a 30-day burn-in alongside your existing pipeline. Once you’re confident, we cut over.
Every Custom Feed includes the same iXBRL filing-reference provenance as the standard products, every field on every row is auditable back to the originating Companies House filing.
Pricing
Pricing scales with three things: refresh cadence (intra-day costs more than weekly), entity volume (the full UK population costs more than a 5,000-firm watchlist), and historical depth (a five-year point-in-time backfill costs more than a forward-only feed).
A typical engagement falls in one of three bands:
- Targeted feed — single use case, one delivery channel, rolling 12-month window. From £24,000 / year.
- Multi-factor feed — two or more combined signal families, one delivery channel, five-year backfill. From £60,000 / year.
- Enterprise feed — multiple delivery channels, dedicated infrastructure, multi-region failover, named solutions engineer. Custom pricing.
All pricing is annual, all SLAs are written into the contract, and every engagement is invoiced against a fixed scope. No metered surprise costs.