The SEC publishes everything. Company filings, executive disclosures, ownership reports, enforcement actions. All of it is publicly accessible on EDGAR. The Federal Reserve publishes 200,000 economic series on FRED. Interest rates, inflation indicators, employment data, monetary policy metrics going back decades.
The data is free. The access is open. So why do compliance teams and risk analysts end up building and maintaining fragile custom integrations instead of just using the raw endpoints?
Because free public access and production-ready data infrastructure are not the same thing.
What raw EDGAR access actually looks like
EDGAR is a filing database, not an API designed for production workloads. The endpoints are public but they have no SLA. There is no schema versioning, which means EDGAR can change its response structure and your integration breaks with no notice. There is no authentication, so you cannot demonstrate to your vendor risk team that you have a formal data relationship with a named provider. There are no service credits if the endpoint is unavailable when your compliance workflow needs it.
For a team running an internal research tool or a one-off analysis, none of this matters. For a regulated entity using EDGAR data in a production compliance workflow (counterparty due diligence, filing monitoring, risk model inputs), all of it matters.
Your vendor risk register needs a named vendor. Your compliance process needs a contractual uptime commitment. Your audit trail needs a record of which data was accessed, when, and by what process.
Raw EDGAR gives you none of those things.
The FRED integration problem
FRED is a different shape of the same problem. The Federal Reserve's data API is well-maintained and the data quality is excellent. But running a direct FRED integration in a production risk model means your model has a dependency on a government endpoint with no SLA, no versioned schema contract, and no formal vendor relationship.
When the FRED endpoint is slow, your model is slow. When FRED changes a series identifier or response format, your model breaks. When your internal audit team asks what data vendor underpins your interest rate inputs, the answer "we call the Federal Reserve directly" is not what they want to hear.
What the compliance workflow actually needs
The data itself is not the gap. The gap is everything around the data that makes it usable in a production environment run by a regulated entity.
A named vendor with a contract and a place in your vendor register. An uptime SLA with service credits so there is a commercial consequence to downtime. Schema versioning with deprecation notices so format changes do not break your integration without warning. Authentication so every API call is attributable. An audit log entry for every call (entity checked, data accessed, timestamp, request ID) so your compliance documentation has the lineage it needs.
These are not luxury features. They are the baseline requirements for using external data in a compliance workflow at a regulated firm.
What Tech Compass provides
The Tech Compass US Compliance Data API wraps SEC EDGAR and FRED with the production infrastructure that raw access does not include.
SEC EDGAR data is available via structured endpoints covering company filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K), executive disclosures, ownership reports, and enforcement actions. FRED economic data covers the full catalogue of 200,000 series via pass-through with authentication and rate limiting applied. Every response includes a data lineage block with the source reference, access timestamp, and a request ID that links to an immutable audit log entry.
The SLA is 99.5% uptime with service credits. Schema changes come with versioned endpoints and deprecation notices. Your vendor risk team gets a named vendor, a contract, and a compliance pack covering data lineage documentation and a pre-filled vendor questionnaire response.
Who uses this
The primary use cases are counterparty due diligence on US-listed entities, economic indicator feeds for risk models and treasury functions, and automated monitoring of SEC filings for entities you have ongoing exposure to.
It is particularly relevant for Australian financial services firms with US counterparties or US-listed investments, fintech platforms that need a reliable US regulatory data feed without building and maintaining a custom EDGAR integration, and risk teams whose models depend on Federal Reserve data and need that dependency to sit behind a formal vendor relationship.
Pricing and access
Free tier covers 10,000 API calls per month with no credit card required. Professional plan is USD 1,500 per month and includes the full SLA, audit logging, and compliance pack.
Documentation is at api.techcompass.com.au/docs. If you are evaluating for a regulated environment, the compliance pack is available on request and includes a pre-filled vendor questionnaire and full data lineage documentation.
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Free tier covers 10,000 calls per month. No credit card required.
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