Bell Tolls for Corporate Data via Twitter

The recent judgment in the USA that social media are acceptable channels to communicate corporate data to shareholders is a major breakthrough one that I hope the financial services industry embraces on mass.

There is no denying that corporate data today is expensive in every single sense. The Corporate entity pays through the nose to create and then distribute their data and there on every type of financial services firm pays a margin on the data they require. With each data supplier adding their costs onto data the cost to the end investor is huge. But like most things they don't know it, as it is bundled in with many other costs that are then covered by services charges or commissions.

How long then can we expect that after this ruling, corporate data will start being issued directly to investors via social media channels? And even financial services firms may start taking their data requirements by the cheapest method possible, enabling them to rationalise their data suppliers and thereby saving huge sums on data costs.

Of course vested interests will be very much in play to prevent anything like the potential I have just outlined but this might only slow things down rather than prevent. For the first time the data supply industry could find that the social media channels will terminally hurt their existing revenue structures. Like the newspaper industry they will have to adapt and find new values for their business. Who does the bell toll for? It might toll for the data suppliers!