Notice of Intent to Sole Source

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), part of the Department of the Treasury, has issued a Notice of Intent to Sole Source for the procurement of Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) subscription access. The agency intends to award a firm fixed-price contract to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania for enterprise access to twelve specialized financial databases. The primary contract period will run from October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2026, with four potential one-year option periods and a possible six-month extension. The procurement falls under NAICS code 518210 for computing infrastructure and data processing services. The OCC has justified this as a sole source acquisition based on WRDS being the only known provider capable of delivering these proprietary financial datasets in a standardized format.

The purpose of this procurement is to provide the OCC with access to critical financial databases including Bank Regulatory Data, CBOE Options data, Fama-French portfolios, SEC Disclosure statistics, and datasets from providers like CRSP, Markit, Compustat, and FISD. The sole source justification emphasizes that WRDS eliminates the significant programming time and costs that would otherwise be required to merge and format data from multiple vendors directly. While the OCC is not actively seeking competitive quotes, the notice allows responsible sources to submit capability information by the September 9, 2025 deadline. The agency retains full discretion to proceed with the sole source procurement regardless of any responses received. This acquisition supports the OCC's research capabilities by providing standardized access to proprietary financial datasets that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to obtain and format independently.