CFINANCIALS. Based in Lutry, the company has just opened part of its financial information site.

The financial world is entering a new era of data transparency. CFinancials’ site is now officially open to the public and offers free financial information. The site will gradually establish itself as a platform that places investors and sellers of products on an equal footing. They will be sharing the same source of information, stresses Michael Heijmeijer, CFinancials’ founder and CEO.

Its impact will go beyond the democratisation of access to financial information. The site enables a huge potential for vertical searching, in the words of Michael Heijmeijer. Unlike Google’s horizontal searches, which are essentially limited to the entry of keywords, CFinancials offers the selection or removal of numerous criteria. As a result, searches that would be impossible to carry out elsewhere – even for professionals – are reduced to a few clicks, with instantaneous display of the number of results before moving to the full list and then to detailed information on each financial product appearing in the list.

The investment funds, ETFs and structured products category, which alone consists of more than 250,000 entries, was opened a few days ago on an unofficial basis. This is already sufficient to demonstrate the platform’s enormous capacity to facilitate even the most exotic searches. Who would have thought that someone looking for a fund that invests in Egyptian shares would find a choice of 21 actively managed products and two ETFs, out of which one of the two ETFs generated the best annual performance? Numerous such examples can be found in just a few minutes. For the official opening today, CFinancials has added financial reports for more than 128,000 companies, with historical data that can go back as far as five years. Other items will be added on a quarterly basis, with the inclusion of stocks, bonds and indices scheduled for the end of the year, and private investments and other products completing the gradual opening at the end of 2011. The public version of the site offers vast amounts of raw data, with the option of paying for more advanced features such as graphical, analytical and comparison tools.