The latest episode in the 'Meet the expert' series: Bernardo Santiago, SVP Managed Services Growth and Client Success, TRG Screen
Bernardo Santiago never planned a career in market data. In fact, his introduction to the industry came while he was at university, when a friend offered him a job paying $50 an hour moving screens around a trading floor in downtown Manhattan.
It turned out to be the start of something much bigger.
After building his career across buy-side and sell-side firms, Bernardo spotted a gap: financial institutions facing increasingly complex market data challenges without the specialist expertise to manage them.
In 2017, he co-founded S4 Market Data to address it.
What began with modest ambitions grew into a thriving business. Along the way, S4 developed a close relationship with TRG Screen – a company Bernardo had first worked with back in 2006. That relationship evolved into a strategic partnership, combining S4’s specialist procurement and vendor negotiation expertise with TRG Screen’s technology and managed services capabilities, before TRG Screen acquired S4 in September 2026.
Now part of TRG Screen’s managed services team, Bernardo brings almost two decades of market data experience and a philosophy grounded firmly in relationships, expertise and remembering the person behind the job.
We caught up with him to talk about the journey, what S4 brings to TRG Screen and why, after all these years, market data still keeps him interested.
I think most people stumble into market data because there still isn’t really a university programme that teaches you how to do it. I certainly did.
I was at university and working in the registrar’s office for about $12 or $13 an hour. One of my friends had dropped out to work full-time and asked me: “How would you like to make $50 an hour?”
I don’t think I even heard what the job was. I just said yes.
Before I knew it, I was on a trading floor in downtown Manhattan moving these green screens around. I remember thinking: “What is this job... and I’m getting paid $50 an hour to do it?”
Afterwards I started asking professors about market data and nobody knew what I was talking about. But I’d seen enough to know there was something interesting there. I’m still grateful to the friend who introduced me to it – he’s still in the industry today, and I probably wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for him.
It was the realization that market data really is the lifeblood of the industry. I came into it at a time when financial services was becoming much more data-driven, so I was able to watch that evolution happen.
The other thing I liked was how much of an organization you get to see. Not only are you working with investment teams or the front office, you’re working with legal, finance, procurement, operations and technology. You get exposure to virtually every part of the firm.
That’s still one of the things I find interesting about it today.
It was over ten years ago, I started noticing something.
I was living in Florida and talking to firms that were clearly dealing with market data challenges, but many didn’t have specialist market data expertise in-house, or even realise that market data management was a discipline in its own right. They were facing many of the same issues as much larger financial institutions, but without the dedicated expertise to manage them. I started to think there was an opportunity to change that.
My co-founder and I honestly didn’t have huge ambitions in terms of scale. We thought we’d each have two or three clients and perhaps eventually hire somebody so that we weren’t constantly drowning in work ourselves.
Instead, we ended up with more than 30 people and 20-plus clients.
That told us something important about the market. We had assumed there were more firms with market data expertise than without it. What we discovered was almost the opposite, and the expertise gap has only become more pronounced as experienced people leave the industry and aren’t necessarily replaced.
My history with TRG Screen goes back to 2006, when I was involved in my first implementation of its technology. I’ve worked with TRG Screen in one form or another ever since.
Actually, I don’t think we would have launched S4 if TRG Screen hadn’t existed.
We knew the technology and understood what it could do, so when we started S4 we knew there was already a toolset we could work with and introduce to firms alongside the expertise we were providing.
S4 really grew up as part of that ecosystem.
More recently, the relationship became a formal partnership. We were brought into opportunities where clients needed specialist support around areas such as vendor negotiations, contract optimization and complex procurement alongside TRG Screen’s existing managed services capabilities.
The acquisition feels like the natural next step. It’s been a long journey, but in many ways it feels like we’ve finally come home.
For me, the offering becomes much more complete.
TRG Screen already has the technology and managed services capabilities to support the operational side of market data management. We’re adding deeper vendor and contract management expertise and the ability to provide the kind of day-to-day market data support you would traditionally expect from an experienced in-house team.
Vendor management in particular is very relationship-driven. Technology gives you the information and control you need, but there are some things you can’t solve through a tool alone.
You’re sitting across from an account manager or commercial team. You need somebody who understands the market, knows what they’re looking at and has the experience to manage that conversation effectively.
That’s what we’re bringing into the wider TRG Screen offering.
And I think it’s reflective of a bigger change happening across the industry. Firms still need market data expertise, but increasingly they’re looking outside their own organizations to access it. The expertise isn’t becoming less important, it’s changing where it sits.
That’s probably the part of the industry that has kept me most motivated.
You build relationships with clients, but you also build them with vendors. We’re working with vendors across multiple clients and sometimes I’ll have back-to-back calls with the same representative for two completely different organizations.
Over time, those relationships matter. They help you understand the landscape and ultimately help you serve your clients better.
The experience matters too. When a prospect explains a problem to us, it’s very rare that they’re describing something we haven’t encountered before.
Often they feel like they’re the only firm dealing with it, or that a vendor is treating them differently. We can say: “We’ve seen this before. You’re not alone. Here’s what’s happening elsewhere and here’s how we can approach it.”
That context can be incredibly valuable.
Cost is obviously a big one.
A firm might receive a renewal and wonder whether an increase is reasonable or whether there’s room to negotiate. Without a point of reference, it’s difficult to know.
Sometimes the value is actually telling somebody that the deal in front of them is a good one. I once had a firm ask me to review a contract because they were hoping to negotiate the price down. I looked at it and said: “It’s flat. You’re keeping the same services with no fee increase. That’s already a win.”
They didn’t have the market context to recognize that.
Licensing and usage is another major area. A contract might have been signed in the US, for example, and somebody in the UK subsequently starts accessing the data without realizing that the agreement doesn’t cover that use.
There doesn’t have to be any bad intent. The people signing the contract often aren’t the people ultimately using the data. But market data licensing can be very specific about who can use data, where they can use it and for what purpose.
That’s where having somebody who understands both the contractual side and the practical reality of how data is being used becomes important.
Understand what you’re actually spending.
We still go into firms where Bloomberg is treated as one spend category, exchanges are somewhere else and other market data services sit in different buckets again. Nobody has put everything together and looked at market data as a whole.
When you do that, the number can sometimes pull people out of their chairs.
Suddenly they realize this is one of their biggest areas of spend and yet they may not have anybody overseeing it as a category.
That’s when you can start asking the important questions. What are we paying for? Are we actually using it? Are there services we don’t need? Are our contracts appropriate?
But you can’t really answer any of those questions until you understand the complete picture.
AI is the obvious one.
For the past 18 months or so, I’ve been getting questions about how AI changes the way firms can use market data.
Initially, vendors were largely trying to understand the use cases themselves. They were talking to clients, gathering information and working through what AI meant for their data.
Now we’re starting to see the commercial and contractual implications emerge.
Firms need to understand whether their existing agreements allow their data to be used for a particular AI application, what restrictions vendors are introducing and what additional charges might apply.
I think that’s the next frontier for both vendors and consumers. The technology may be new, but the fundamental questions are familiar: what are you using, how are you using it, what have you contracted for and what is it going to cost?
I try to be very mindful that the person I’m dealing with is a person; whether that’s somebody on my team, a client or somebody working for a vendor.
The person sitting across from you isn’t the vendor. They’re somebody who had to drop their kid at school that morning or run errands or deal with everything else going on in their life, just like you did.
I think people sometimes lose sight of that in commercial conversations.
We all have jobs to do and sometimes we’re going to be on opposite sides of a negotiation. But you can still treat somebody like a human being.
That’s something I’ve always tried to carry with me, and I think people appreciate it.
I used to be a DJ.
It was around my university years, back when being a DJ meant carrying all your vinyl around with you. I look at DJs now walking in with a laptop and I’m slightly envious.
I played pretty much everything; house, hip-hop, reggae, Latin music, rock. At university you’ve got a lot of different groups of people to keep happy, so you learn to mix it up.
I stopped because somebody gave me what turned out to be some pretty bad advice: “You need to get a real job.” Not long afterwards, DJs started getting signed to gigantic nightclub deals and I remember thinking: that could definitely have been a real job.
These days, most of my time outside work is about family. I have a 13-year-old son and I’m conscious that there’s only so much time before he’s off doing his own thing, so I try to make the most of it.
At the moment he’s into heavy metal. So, naturally, I’m into heavy metal too.
Stay tuned for more expert insights in our Meet the Expert series, where we showcase the people behind TRG Screen and their contributions to the financial services industry.