The number of different transactions types passed over brokerage API's is staggering.
On a weekly basis, over 100 different transaction types come across the API from our 20+ broker integrations. BUY, SELL, and CONTRIBUTION are pretty common - but what about DUTCH TENDER? That's a good one. Sometimes we see LITIGATION, too. That's also a good one.
In raw form, it is a monumental task to sort, categorize, and unify those types so that they are useable. Transactions are arguably the wildest area of building to brokerage APIs.
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Transactions data is incredibly useful for apps building investing experiences for any kind of portfolio analysis. It's difficult to tell an investors about their buying behavior and tendencies without unified transactions data.
The challenge is institutions format their transactions data differently. If you connect to multiple investment company’s data feeds and get trade data, you're going to see the data sets mostly contain similar data, but the formatting is always inconsistent.
Unifying this data is crucial. But first you need to get it.
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This is easier said than done. There could be any number of barriers for you to get transactions data:
- Data Access Restrictions
- API Rate Limits and Costs
- Historical Data Volume
- Legacy Systems
- Delay's in Data Synchronization
You will encounter these issues and many more on your journey towards building a transactions data utopia.
Once you get it, a formalized, iterative process of logging new transaction types, and intentional observability, is a must to ensure you are organized. That is a lot of work.
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Building broker integrations to multiple brokers compounds the challenge of unifying transactions data. It can be done, but its expensive and time consuming.
Take a look at our journey at unifying the hundreds of transactions types that comes across broker APIs every week. It's the wild west.
