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Core vs Finance

This page explains what each package provides, how they relate, and what the Finance layer adds for capital-markets use cases.

Core is the engine. Finance is the engine tuned for capital markets.

KX Refinery Core is a general-purpose platform for capturing, storing, and analyzing time-series data — it makes no assumptions about your business domain. The Finance package is a domain layer that sits on top of Core and turns it into a ready-to-run market-data refinery for trades, quotes, order books, reference data, and corporate actions.

Finance does not replace Core — it extends it. A Finance deployment is Core plus the Finance layer, running together.

KX Refinery Core

Core is a modular platform for data capture, storage, and analytics. Its architecture keeps business logic out of the platform and in the applications that use it, so applications plug into the data they need without being tightly bound to specific schemas or process topology. See Features and Architecture for detail.

What Core gives you:

  • Access to both historical and streaming real-time content.
  • Horizontally and vertically scalable — no fixed limit on performance or capacity.
  • "Hot-Hot" high-availability architecture for mission-critical use cases.
  • Flexible deployment: on-premise, cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure), or hybrid.
  • Sandboxes for data science and research.
  • An extensible analytics API (user-defined functions) and extensible schemas.
  • A complete system-management and monitoring solution.
  • A full pub/sub layer for streaming real-time content.

Core's data API is deliberately generic: getTicks (query time-series data), getStats (query analytics over that data), and getUDF (user-defined functions).

Core ships with no data pipelines

Out of the box, Core provides the platform, the storage tiers, the query gateway, and the generic API — but the schemas and pipelines that describe your data are added by a domain or client package on top. This is what makes Core reusable across any industry. See Domain and Client Extensions.

The Finance package

Finance is a domain package layered on top of Core that pre-configures the platform for capital markets. It ships the schemas, pipelines, feed integrations, and market-data analytics that a financial-data platform needs on day one — so you start with a working market-data refinery rather than an empty platform.

The Finance layer adds:

  • Prebuilt market-data pipelines across asset classes: equities, equity L2, futures, futures L2, FX, fixed income, indices, money markets, and listed options.
  • Trade & quote (TAQ) and Level 2 order-book data models — including order-book depth and intraday/current snapshots.
  • Refinitiv market-data integration — Tick History (TRTH) ingestion, real-time feed handling, and DataScope Plus (DSP) reference-data downloads.
  • Corporate actions — split and dividend adjustments applied to historical prices.
  • Cancellations and corrections handling for trade data.
  • Condition-code filter rules — named rules that cleanse the trade/quote data the API returns.
  • Security-master and reference data, plus a trading calendar / venue data.
  • Real-time daily summaries tracked continuously and served instantly.
  • Client-facing tooling: watchlist management, CSV client upload, and a request/report generator.

Finance requires Core

Finance is a layer on top of Core and is released in lockstep with it — both are on the same 5.16.0 release line. See the Finance admin guide and Finance server-side API.

How the two relate

Refinery is built to be layered. Packages stack in a fixed order, each able to customize the layer beneath it without breaking or overwriting it:

Layer Role Load order
Client Your site-specific tables, pipelines, and overrides 3rd (highest priority)
Domain (for example, Finance) Industry-specific schemas, pipelines, APIs 2nd
Core The general-purpose platform 1st (base)

Packages load core → domain → client, and configuration priority runs the other way (client > domain > core). Because the domain layer plugs in through defined hooks, a domain feature adds capability where Core alone would behave generically — the platform underneath is unchanged and upgradeable. See Domain and Client Extensions.

Side-by-side comparison

Capability Core (platform) Finance (Core + Finance layer)
Purpose Domain-agnostic capture, storage & analytics Capital-markets market-data refinery
Data pipelines out of the box None — you define them Prebuilt across 9 asset classes
Data model / schemas Generic, user-defined Trade & quote (TAQ), L2 order-book depth & snapshots, reference data
Market-data ingestion Generic loaders Refinitiv TRTH, real-time feed handler, DataScope Plus
Data API getTicks, getStats, getUDF Enhanced getTicks / getStats, plus getBars, getSummary, getRef
Corporate actions — Split & dividend adjustments on demand
Cancellations / corrections — Built-in handling
Condition-code filtering — Named filter rules to cleanse trade/quote data
Reference data — Security master, trading calendar, venue data
Real-time daily stats Via generic analytics Dedicated getSummary (tracked in real time)
Scalability & HA Hot-Hot, cloud/on-prem/hybrid, elastic Inherited from Core
Monitoring & management Included Inherited from Core

Advantages of the Finance package

For a financial-market-data use case, the Finance layer delivers value that a bare Core install would otherwise require you to build yourself:

  • Faster time to value.

    Prebuilt pipelines for equities, futures, FX, fixed income, indices, money markets, and listed options (including L2) mean you are capturing and querying market data on day one instead of designing schemas and pipelines from scratch.

  • A richer, market-aware API.

    Finance enhances the generic getTicks and getStats with capital-markets parameters — apply corporate-action adjustments (adjustCorAx), cancellations/corrections (applyCanCor), condition-code filters (filterRule), select an assetClass, choose an identifier type (idType), and pull L2 depth (numLevels) — all applied on demand at query time. It also adds three finance-specific functions: getBars (pre-aggregated bars), getRef (static reference data), and getSummary. See the Finance server-side API.

  • Familiar, capital-markets vocabulary.

    The Finance API speaks the terms a market-data user already knows, rather than the platform's generic ones. Instrument lists are symList (the generic core parameter is idList), the class of instrument is assetClass — with readable values such as equity, future, foreignExchange, fixedIncome, index, moneyMarket, and listedOptions — and identifier remapping is customSymbologyMapping. Finance also adds parameters with no generic equivalent (adjustCorAx, applyCanCor, filterRule, numLevels), so a single query expresses a full market-data request in domain language.

  • Built-in data quality.

    Corporate-action adjustments, cancellation/correction handling, and named condition-code filter rules mean the data your users receive is already cleansed and adjusted — without bespoke post-processing.

  • Depth and breadth of market data.

    Native Level 2 order-book support (depth and snapshots) alongside trade & quote (TAQ) data covers both top-of-book and full-depth use cases.

  • Real-time daily summaries, fast.

    Current daily statistics are tracked in real time and served through getSummary, whose response time is orders of magnitude faster than running the equivalent getStats query against real-time data.

  • Refinitiv integration out of the box.

    Tick History (TRTH) ingestion, real-time feed handling, and DataScope Plus reference-data downloads are pre-integrated — no custom feed engineering to connect to Refinitiv sources.

  • All the platform strengths of Core, unchanged.

    Because Finance is a layer on Core, it inherits Core's scalability, Hot-Hot high availability, multi-cloud/on-prem deployment options, monitoring, and extensibility. You add finance capability without giving up any platform capability.

Which to choose

Choose Core when you need a general-purpose, high-performance time-series platform and will define your own domain schemas and pipelines.

Choose Finance when your domain is capital markets. You get everything Core offers plus a ready-made market-data refinery: prebuilt asset-class pipelines, trade/quote and L2 data models, Refinitiv ingestion, corporate-action and filter-rule processing, reference data, and a market-aware API.