In this edition of Meet the Expert, we chat with Ernesto Sue - Technical Solutions Manager at TRG Screen.
On solving complex problems, closing the market data knowledge gap and why technology works best when you understand what sits behind it.
Some people build their careers by following a defined path. Ernesto Sue has built his by finding problems to solve. Market data teams repeatedly sing his praises, and our own global sales team named him a 2026 Unsung Hero for his behind-the-scenes work helping firms worldwide get maximum value out of our solutions.
Having spent much of his career on the client side before joining TRG Screen ten years ago, Ernesto brings both perspectives to the table. It’s a combination that has shaped how he approaches technology, client challenges and an industry that continues to lose specialized expertise and institutional knowledge.
We sat down with Ernesto to talk about his journey, why understanding the full market data lifecycle matters, where AI genuinely helps and the surprising connection between technical problem-solving and cinematic photography.
My background was predominantly on the client side, and if you’d asked me back then whether I saw myself moving to the vendor side, the answer would have been no.
What changed my mind was the opportunity to learn.
That has always been a big driver for me. I started in market data straight out of high school and quickly realized that technology could help me solve many of the problems I was encountering. I taught myself databases and development alongside my day job, and that accelerated my career because I wasn’t just identifying problems – I could build solutions to them.
Eventually, I reached a point where I felt my learning had plateaued. One of TRG Screen’s founders, knew me from my time as a client and mentioned an opportunity here. I saw the chance to make technology and problem-solving my primary focus.
My plan was to stay for three years, build my technical skills and then move back to the client side. But I stayed.
I liked the culture, I liked the learning environment and, importantly, I liked that no two days were the same. There was always another problem to understand and another challenge to solve.
I started as essentially a one-man implementation team, helped build out that function and, this year, moved into Technical Solutions. Ten years later, I’m building something new again.
One of our biggest priorities right now is the migration of our EU and APAC clients from our legacy InfoMatch solution to Optimize Spend. My team is leading the technical side of that work.
But our remit goes much further.
We own the Hypercare phase of implementation and post go-live support, working closely with clients immediately after migrations and implementations. We support major projects such as transitioning to alternative accounting methodologies, corporate structure consolidations and deletions, large-scale data clean-ups and bespoke development.
And I’m still very hands-on. If the answer requires a stored procedure, a data transformation pipeline or a specific configuration, I’ll build it and deploy it myself.
That’s important to me because I like being close to the problem. I don't want to just tell somebody what the answer should be. I want to understand what is happening, build the solution and see it working.
I can genuinely relate to the daily challenges, and how much it means when you finally solve a tough problem.
Before joining TRG Screen, I was solving many of the same problems our clients bring to us today. The difference is that I often had to take ten steps to figure something out because there wasn’t necessarily somebody there who could show me the way.
Now, if my experience means a client only has to take one of those steps, that’s valuable.
For me, the objective is very simple: move the client from stuck to solved.
That applies whether I’m working with a smaller regional institution or a large global organization. They have a problem they can’t get past, and my job is to find a way through it.
But I also don't want to solve something in a way that makes the client permanently dependent on me. When an engagement finishes, I want them to have a working solution and understand it well enough to manage it themselves if they choose to.
There are really two things happening.
The first is a generational knowledge exodus. People who have spent decades in this industry are leaving, either through choice or circumstance, and a lot of what they know has never been formally documented. It exists in people's heads. When they leave, that knowledge can leave with them.
The second issue is fragmentation.
Market data has become increasingly specialized. You may have somebody focused on invoices, somebody else negotiating contracts, another person handling MAC activity and others responsible for exchange reporting or audits.
Those people can be extremely good at what they do, but they may not understand how their piece connects to everything else.
That becomes a problem because market data is interconnected.
If you're processing an invoice but don't understand what was negotiated in the contract, you may be paying for something that has been renegotiated or cancelled. If you're responsible for exchange reporting but don't understand how upstream MAC (moves, adds, changes) activity affects what you're reporting, you can create another disconnect.
Individually, each process might appear to work. The risk emerges in the gaps between them. And those gaps can remain unnoticed for years before eventually appearing as an overpayment, a discrepancy or an audit issue.
I think you need both.
You need specialists, but you also need people who understand how the pieces connect. I sometimes compare it to a factory. You can know everything about one point on the production line, but when the finished product stops working, understanding what happened at the other stages helps you work out where the problem originated.
Market data is similar.
Contracts, entitlements, invoices, exchange reporting and accounting aren’t separate worlds. What happens in one can affect another.
The more you understand that end-to-end process, the better equipped you are to anticipate problems rather than discovering them after something has already gone wrong.
AI is a tool – a very useful one – but I don't think it removes the need for knowledge.
There are things it already does incredibly well. It can analyze dense information such as contracts, exchange guidance and large volumes of documentation far more quickly than a person could. My team is already using it to reduce repetitive work and turn tasks that once took hours into something much faster.
But there's an important distinction between accessing information and knowing how to apply it.
AI can't sit on a client call, read the room, understand what somebody is really trying to say or use years of experience to navigate a situation spanning contracts, invoicing, accounting and exchange obligations.
I think of it a little like putting a hammer in someone's hand. In the right hands, you can build something with it. Without the underlying knowledge of what you're trying to build, having the tool doesn't automatically give you the outcome.
AI amplifies what you bring to it. That's why retaining and developing industry knowledge still matters so much.
Accounting 101.
You don't need to become an accountant, but you should understand the basics of how the decisions you're making flow through to finance.
Understand the difference between cash and accrual accounting. Understand how subscriptions map to cost centers. Understand how the allocation being managed ultimately appears in the general ledger.
It makes conversations with finance and the business much easier, but it also makes you better at other parts of the job, including vendor negotiations, because you understand the wider financial and business implications of the decisions you're making.
I've seen a lot of unnecessary complexity created because that basic connection isn't understood.
Finding patterns.
My first role in market data involved reconciling ILX invoices. The process was taking the team an entire month every cycle. (ILX was formerly owned by Thomson Financial Services.)
After doing it manually for three or four months, I started seeing a pattern and thought there had to be a better way. The problem was that I knew nothing about databases or development.
So, I bought a 400-page Microsoft Access book and read it on my commute – around two and a half hours on the train every day. Then I would go into work and try out what I'd learned.
Eventually, I built a database and wrote the code around it. The process that had taken a month came down to around three days.
My manager saw what I'd done and offered me my first official role at the bank. That's really how my career in this industry began.
And the same pattern has repeated ever since. A manual migration review becomes automated. A reconciliation that takes months becomes something that can run overnight.
You find the repeating friction, understand the process deeply enough to break it into its simplest components and then use technology to build a better way.
Definitely. If somebody on my team is stuck, I don't necessarily want to just give them the answer. I want to help them recognize the pattern that leads to the answer.
Because once you understand the pattern, you haven't only solved that one problem.
The next time it appears – even if it looks slightly different – you have a way of thinking that helps you solve it yourself.
For me, that's much more valuable.
Photography.
I create cinematic images – think movie-poster style – and I try to achieve as much as possible in-camera rather than relying heavily on post-production.
That's part of the challenge for me. I enjoy working out how to get the lighting, composition and other elements right at the point of capture rather than assuming I can fix everything afterwards.
Thinking about it, there is probably a connection with how I work technically too. I'd rather understand something properly and build it correctly from the start than continually patch it afterwards.
Outside of that, I'll admit I'm something of a workaholic. When I do switch off, I like getting in the car and taking short drives somewhere. Although for somebody who spends his working life dealing with new problems, I'm actually quite a creature of habit – I tend to find places I like and keep going back to them.
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.