Anyone else feel like 2025 disappeared in a blur?
For market data teams, it wasn’t just fast… it was nonstop. Expectations kept rising while headroom didn’t, and many long-standing assumptions about how market data should be managed began to crack. AI moved from wait-and-watch to front and center.
Amid all of that 2025 excitement, one other thing happened.
We launched our monthly LinkedIn thought leadership newsletter: Market Data Matters, designed to show solidarity with problems market data leaders are facing by providing a trusted “anti-product” information source.
Across ten editions, 20+ articles, dozens of interviews with our experts and industry partners ─ and now 2,070+ subscribers ─ we worked hard to bring you unflinching perspectives from our SMEs: where market teams were getting stuck, where they were finding leverage and which playbooks were no longer working.
We’ve had amazing feedback so far, with many clients telling us they’ve even started using the content to help train their teams. We’re honored to hear that, and we thought this quick index of the year might be useful for you.
What follows is a practical roundup of every story, organized by theme. Each story takes under 5 minutes to read. We urge you to bookmark this. And subscribe to Market Data Matters if you haven’t yet. Because we can tell already there’ll be no shortage of topics to tackle in 2026!
One promising and pragmatic use case: rights management and analysis (RM&A) - Explores how AI can be applied safely and productively to license interpretation and usage validation, reducing reliance on scarce legal expertise while keeping humans firmly in the loop.
The AI Diet: Why less data often delivers better AI outcomes - Challenges the assumption that more data makes AI smarter, showing why tightly curated, domain-specific inputs produce more accurate and usable results in market data workflows.
Making AI work for you: getting real value from GenAI (not just hype) - Practical lessons from deploying AI inside our own operations, covering how to define use cases, prepare data, embed tools into workflows and avoid common adoption traps.
AI in market data: how to make it work for you - A discussion with TRG Screen’s AI and market data experts on explainability, governance and why AI only delivers value when paired with strong domain expertise.
Market Data Management meets AI: a roundtable view on what changes now - A candid expert roundtable on how AI is already transforming visibility, decision-making and workflows, and why the pace of change will only accelerate.
What the smartest firms are getting right about AI: four behaviors separating early winners from everyone else - Identifies the consistent behaviors seen in firms pulling ahead with AI, from value-led use cases to disciplined data stewardship and AI-first roles.
Market data prices officially reach unsustainable levels - Unpacks new industry research showing renewal increases far outpacing budgets, and why transparency and usage insight now matter more than negotiation alone.
The best strategy for reducing market data costs: better procurement or tighter usage control? - Examines the limits of procurement-led savings and makes the case for combining negotiation with real usage visibility and governance.
Budgeting for market data expenses isn’t over, it’s only just begun - Explains why the hardest part of budgeting starts after sign-off, and how teams maintain control through renewals, audits and business change.
Six things you can’t afford to ignore in contract renewals - A practical checklist of renewal risks; missed cancellation windows, evergreen contracts and misleading supplier usage data, drawn from real-world examples.
Procurement’s market data challenge: why the usual playbook falls short - Explains why market data resists standard procurement controls and how procurement and market data teams can align without slowing the business.
Expert Q&A: The 3 Vs you can’t afford to ignore: Velocity, Volume, Value - Looks at why traditional market data operating models are quietly failing under growing pressure, and how leading teams are redesigning roles and capacity.
When everything’s a priority, where do you start? Why invoice processing is the smartest first move - Makes the case for starting transformation with invoice processing, showing how automation here unlocks time, accuracy and downstream value.
Outsourcing of market data program administration: what shifted, what surprised in 2025… and what comes next - Explores why outsourcing moved from a tactical relief to operating model rethink, and what firms discovered once visibility improved.
The challenge of global exchange compliance and 8 blind spots to check now - A deep dive into subtle exchange policy and pricing changes that create hidden compliance risk, often only uncovered during audits.
When the exchange comes knocking: your audit readiness checklist - A practical guide to preparing for modern, remote exchange audits; from documentation and entitlements to managing scope and close out.
The changing role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) - Explores how CDOs are increasingly influencing market data governance and value conversations, and what that means for engagement models.
Why Bangalore is emerging as a global market data powerhouse - Shows how Bangalore has evolved from a cost center into a true center of excellence for market data operations, driven by talent depth and scale.
Whether you read these pieces when they first came out or are discovering them now, we hope this roundup gives you a useful view of themes that defined the year, and the questions that will shape 2026.
👉 Subscribe to Market Data Matters to get new editions delivered directly to your inbox in 2026, and join the conversation on what’s changing, what’s working and what comes next.
From all of us at TRG Screen, we wish you a restful end to the year and hope you’re able to carve out some time to switch off, recharge and enjoy the break in whatever way works for you. We look forward to continuing the conversation in the new year.