The latest episode in the ‘Meet the expert’ series
If there’s one thing Deepak Rajagopal brings to every challenge, it’s unstoppable curiosity and the conviction to do things differently.
As the Global Head of Managed Services at TRG Screen, he leads a global team that helps customers cut through operational noise and refocus on what really matters. From invoice processing to usage validation, his team handles the essential day-to-day tasks that free up customers’ market data teams to deliver greater strategic value.
But Deepak’s role goes far beyond this. Since joining in 2024, he’s helped reshape how TRG Screen scales and supports customers – most notably by launching the company’s Global Capability Center in Bangalore, India, from the ground up in under 90 days.
We caught up with Deepak to talk about building from scratch, challenging the status quo, and helping market data teams shift from admin-heavy to impact-ready.
I lead the Managed Services business unit at TRG Screen. It’s a team that takes on the commercial administration and operational load for our customers – things like invoice processing, vendor orders, contract admin, usage validation – the time-consuming but necessary work that often prevents teams from focusing on higher-value priorities.
Our belief is that by shouldering the administration activities for customers, we unlock their capacity to focus on value generation for the business. We are on a path to establishing a global industry utility for commercial administration of market data. That’s where our Global Capability Centre (GCC) in Bangalore comes in.
We launched the GCC in just 90 days, and it’s already home to more than 70 team members and growing fast. We chose Bangalore for a reason – not just for cost, but for its industry depth and caliber of talent. The city is now a global hub for market data, with a unique mix of technical expertise, financial acumen and operational scale.
It was important to me and our entire team that to design the GCC as a long-term strategic foundation – not just for managed services, but to support teams across the business to scale.
>> Learn about Bangalore as a global market data powerhouse
Our customers are under constant pressure to do deliver more with less. - constantly juggling competing priorities and bending to the speed of business change, the volume of market data vendor activity and the rising expectation to show value. They’re not just managing costs. I call this the challenge of the 3 Vs: velocity, volume and value. It’s a simple way to capture what the industry is up against, and right now, value is the one that gets squeezed the most.
That’s where I come in. My job is to give customers the headroom to rise above the admin. The space to challenge spend. To dig into usage. Our customers can’t do any of that if their best people are buried in reconciliation and manual tasks. I work with them to help them change that.
I’m motivated by the fact that we deliver with a consistency and quality that helps to create tangible capacity for our customers. Customers know they can rely on us to operate as an extension of their team, and to do it well day after day. That’s true business value.
>> Deepak dives into the 3 Vs in this Q&A: The 3 Vs you can’t afford to ignore
I’ve spent years helping organizations build industry utilities in other domains – like KYC (know your customer), compliance, finance – where standardization, shared infrastructure and repeatable models deliver huge, lasting benefits. I believe market data management is ready for the same shift.
Customers don’t just want help getting things done. They want predictability. They want a model that simplifies the complexity, lowers the admin burden, and allows them to focus on what matters: value. This is what I mean by an industry utility.
That’s where my focus on managed services comes in – especially as we bring more AI into the picture. We’re already seeing this with invoice processing, where AI helps us deliver faster, more accurate outcomes.
It’s not just about helping firms cope with the pressure. It’s about redesigning how the work is done in the first place.
Start by asking: what’s holding you back?
If your team is stuck doing high-volume, low-complexity tasks – that’s wasted capacity. Yes, they are tasks that need to be done, but they shouldn’t hold back your best people.
I always say you don’t need to fix everything at once. You don’t have to outsource everything. But you do need to start. The smartest firms begin with the basics: offload the admin, unlock the time and move upstream from there.
>> In case you missed it: Start where it hurts most: why invoice processing is the smartest first move
The opportunity to build, and the freedom to follow through.
TRG Screen gave me both. When I joined, there was a vision for scale our managed services but no set roadmap yet. I was trusted to run with it. That trust – to move fast, make bold decisions, and turn ideas into outcomes – has made all the difference. That’s rare. And it’s energizing.
And there’s a bigger picture, too. This space is overdue for reinvention. If we get this right, the industry has the opportunity to elevate the entire role market data managers play inside firms. That’s a challenge worth taking on.
Deepak with his beloved family in Eype, a charming historic village on the Jurassic Coast overlooking the English Channel.
Curiosity. And a healthy disregard for ‘that’s how we’ve always done it.’
I like to ask: why this way? What if we tried something different? What’s the cost of sticking with the status quo? Sometimes the shift is small, sometimes it’s big. But you don’t move forward unless you’re willing to question the assumptions.
I’m into robotics and large-scale, radio-controlled models. My son and I build them together – we recently finished a three-foot drone. It’s a bit too big to fly without a license, so for now, it lives and bobs about in the garden!
It’s part engineering, part creative outlet, and a fun way to learn and build together – even when we’re breaking things to figure them out.
Every couple of weeks, I meet up with a group of friends I’ve known for over 20 years. We all met through work, and we’ve made a tradition of catching up at the same local pub. It’s relaxed, it’s familiar. And it’s one of those simple things that helps you keep perspective. Whatever the week’s been like, we show up, have a laugh and reset.
Stay tuned for more expert insights in our Meet the Expert series, where we showcase the incredible talent behind TRG Screen and their contributions to the financial services industry.