The wiki-data site will open up access to a subset of over two hundred thousand verified and maintained business entity data records of Avox content. Users will find basic information about those business entities including their legal name, country of incorporation and operation, state/province/region and city of operation and an Avox identifier (Avid).

Ken Price, CEO and co-founder of Avox says the industry has been demanding a low cost business entity data standard for years. "We believe this is a big step toward achieving such a standard however we fully intend to collaborate with other key industry players who will add content and significant value to the offering," he says. "A successful standard must be a shared standard in our view."

Price points to partnerships with S&P, Markit, IDC and Swift as examples of this collaboration.

Julia Sutton, global head of customer accounts for the institutional client group at Citigroup, and an Avox subscriber, welcomes the initiative. "Wiki-data is yet another example of the collaborative model at work," she says. "Anyone that uses data from wiki-data.com will be consistent with a number of major industry players including Citi, Barclays and Nomura. We see this as a major efficiency play as usage expands."

Internet access of the data for primary usage is restriction and cost free. Users will be able to purchase additional data attributes or regular updates of the complete file as an annual subscription. Third parties can license the content as the basis for their directory and identification services.

Avox's Price says the key objective is for all major industry participants to use the same underlying data.

"One of the great benefits of the Internet is that we can now leverage a global community of data checkers who can point out remaining potential errors, changes or omissions which our central team of data experts can address straight away. There is no better way of maximising data quality."

He says that additional capabilities such as online record linking, user commentary and the facility to add new records which can be verified by Avox or other firms are planned for the future.

Avox has also established a blog and LinkedIn group in an effort to encourage comment and input around the platform and content.