This is the 10th edition of our industry newsletter with musings, observations and ideas regarding the challenges and opportunities facing market data management leaders.
2025 was the year market data teams ran out of room to maneuver.
Spend rose faster than budgets. Audits multiplied. Licensing rules tightened. And the operational load inside most firms hit a level that simply wasn’t sustainable anymore.
Against that backdrop, outsourcing shifted from a tactical fix to a strategic rethink. But the reasons firms turned to external support, and the reasons others hesitated, were more nuanced than the headline trends suggest.
“This year felt different. The pressure wasn’t incremental. It wasn’t cyclical. It was structural. And we believe it signals a permanent shift in how market data must be managed.”
We sat down with Deepak Rajagopal (Global Head of Customer Care & Managed Services, TRG Screen) and Bernardo Santiago (CEO and Co-Founder, S4 Market Data, a new strategic TRG Screen partner) to unpack what really changed this year and what it means for 2026.
>>> ICYMI: TRG Screen and S4 Market Data Join Forces
Here are the themes that emerged.
Demand to scale without hiring
Market data teams are expected to advise on sourcing, challenge demand, manage consumption and prevent spend before it happens.
But this kind of work is impossible when teams are stuck in low-value admin, and management is no longer willing to add headcount for manual work that doesn’t move the business forward.
Deepak put it plainly:
“There’s no joy in having an army of people doing commercial administration activities. No modern financial institution wants to operate like a back-office processing shop anymore.”
Outsourcing has increasingly become the mechanism that frees teams to do the work their stakeholders actually value.
AI changing the operating model
AI began taking over tasks once thought unavoidable:
It doesn’t replace human oversight, but it has fundamentally changed what humans should be doing.
Once firms saw how quickly repetitive work could be automated, expanding internal headcount just to keep up with volume stopped making sense.
As Deepak noted:
“We’re past the point of people keying data. AI initiates the work, and humans verify and sign off. That completely changes what internal teams should be doing.”
For many firms, outsourcing is now the fastest route to an AI-enabled operating model they can’t build internally at the same pace.
Complexity broke the old operating model
Audits activity didn’t just increase; it came from new places. Providers that rarely audited began doing so with the support of third parties.
Bernardo highlighted the shift:
“You used to expect audits from the same handful of providers every few years. Now, audits come from everywhere.”
Suddenly, firms had to defend usage they couldn’t fully trace, justify renewals they didn’t see coming for various reasons, and explain consumption patterns that had spread across desks, regions and systems.
For many, this was the breaking point.
The biggest blocker (and misconception) is fear of losing control – not an uncommon concern heard in B2B around virtually any managed service.
But outsourcing takes away the admin grind, not strategic decisions, not the business relationships, not the oversight. Some teams even worry it replaces them; it doesn’t.
It clears the noise that hides what’s really happening and lets teams focus on the judgment-heavy work only they can do.
The second hesitation is the belief that outsourcing must be all or nothing. In reality, the strongest results come from hybrid models where internal teams stay close to the business, and external partners absorb the operational drag.
And the third misconception is cost.
Bernardo made the distinction clear:
“People assume outsourcing adds cost. Mismanaging market data is what adds cost. Outsourcing usually just exposes what’s already leaking.”
But the more revealing insight was about opportunity cost, the value lost when teams are too stretched to look for it.
Deepak summed it up:
“Most firms compare salaries to vendor fees. What they miss is the value lost in the gaps – the savings no one catches because they’re too busy doing the basics, and the missed opportunity to deliver anything meaningful back to the business.”
The biggest behavioral reset of 2025 was the move away from piecemeal outsourcing.
For years, firms handed off one slice of the workflow; tasks like invoice processing, order administration, exchange declarations. But giving away one piece rarely solves anything because everything is interconnected.
If inventory isn’t accurate, invoices won’t reconcile. If usage isn’t governed, renewals become semi-educated guesswork. If sourcing isn’t aligned with demand, costs drift.
Deepak addressed it head-on:
“What we have learned over the years is if you try to outsource just one piece, all you’re doing is shifting the bottleneck. These workflows are connected end-to-end… you either solve the whole chain or you solve nothing.”
This year, firms shifted from task-based outsourcing to outcome-based expectations, and they increasingly want partners who bring expert insight, not just capacity:
The scale of visibility gaps
When usage and spend were surfaced clearly – rather than buried in tools, spreadsheets or assumptions – firms consistently found:
Deepak describes the typical reaction:
“The moment the data is visualized, you can see the shock. They realize instantly where money is leaking.”
The surprise wasn’t that issues existed.
It was how much leakage and exposure had quietly accumulated beneath the surface.
How quickly visibility turns into real savings
Once firms saw the data clearly, the speed of the impact surprised them.
Decisions that once dragged on - “let’s review this next quarter” - became instant:
"We’re not using that, cut it.”
“That desk closed months ago, shut it off.”
Some firms saw reductions within the first monthly cycle. Many had been carrying legacy costs for months or years without knowing it.
The surprise was in how quickly the savings materialized once the blind spots disappeared.
The risk sitting inside specialist data sets
Use-case restricted feeds and redistribution-sensitive feeds proved far more dangerous than expected.
Some feeds are so tightly licensed that a single misunderstanding can lead to a material liability, and these are often the ones receiving the least attention.
Bernardo was clear:
“These are the feeds that keep people up at night. Not because they’re expensive, but because one wrong move triggers liability.”
2025 marked a real inflection point. Market data management became too complex, too scrutinised and too costly to run the old way.
The firms making progress didn’t just outsource more, they rethought the operating model:
And as Deepak concluded:
“2026 will reward firms that act decisively. The question isn’t whether the operating model will change—it’s whether you’ll lead the change or be forced into it.”
2026 will reward the firms that answer those questions honestly, and act on them.