At the same time, the demands from the business grow louder: prove the value, cut the costs and do it yesterday.
It’s a reality Trip Wadleigh, Head of Strategic Relationships at TRG Screen, knows well.
“The T-shirt we all wear says ‘Do more with less’. Volumes aren’t letting up,
the data demands are big and the train keeps rolling down the tracks. But the headcount
isn’t coming. Something has to give.”
In a recent TRG Screen webinar, Trip joined Deepak Rajagopal, Global Head of Managed Services, to talk about what that ‘something’ should be and why. For most firms, the answer starts with freeing teams from the low-value, high-effort work that quietly eats most of their day.
Across the industry, market data managers find themselves caught on what Deepak calls the value continuum. On one end: essential but time-hungry commercial administration, like invoice processing, inventory updates, order fulfilment.
On the other: high-value, strategic work such as negotiating contracts, evaluating new services, finding creative ways to deliver more with less. The activities that senior management actually wants to see.
The problem? Too many teams are stuck on the wrong end.
“If you’re buried in commercial administration,” Deepak explained, “you’re not focusing on the value-added tasks your organization expects from you. You’re spending your time keeping up with processes instead of influencing the big decisions.”
A live poll of the webinar audience confirmed the pattern we see globally: invoice processing and inventory management dominate the workload for most market data teams. Deepak didn’t mince words:
“These two alone can swallow 30–40% of operational capacity. Unlock that, and you create the space to focus on the rest.”
The irony is that while market data leaders are tasked with transformation, the change doesn’t have to start with sweeping overhauls. Trip urged teams to focus on the ‘low-hanging fruit’ first – the low-complexity, high-repetition tasks that are easiest to automate or hand off.
“You can’t change your whole program at once. But you can take the first steps by targeting the work that’s repetitive, low complexity, and ripe for automation or outsourcing.”
In practice, that often means starting with invoice processing. That’s where technologies like AI, deployed with human oversight, are starting to make a real difference. TRG Screen, for example, is using AI to extract data from invoices, read contracts and process vendor notifications – reducing processes that once ate up days to hours.
But technology is only part of the answer. For many, managed services can provide immediate capacity and offer a faster route to value.
“You can spend three to six months building an internal solution,” Deepak said, “or you can
turn on a service and get value from month one.”
For many firms, the fastest path isn’t building new tools in-house, it’s partnering with a provider who can take on the work and deliver results from day one.
“Managed services take away the pain points you have today in invoice processing and inventory management, and deliver them back to you as a service with measurable outcomes,”
Deepak explained.
Trip noted that it’s more than just moving the process elsewhere:
“It’s not just a handover, it’s a chance to align with best practice. An opportunity to reset; review what’s working, clean up inefficiencies and make sure the process is as effective as possible.”
By removing manual, low-value tasks from the team’s plate and running them to best practice, managed services can free up internal resources for higher-value strategic work, without waiting months for results.
Budget constraints and competing priorities remain the top barriers to modernization, according to another poll during the session. But Trip believes many leaders underestimate the organization-wide impact of market data transformation.
“It’s not just the market data function that benefits. Finance gets cleaner data faster. Procurement negotiates from a stronger position. Business lines get quicker, more accurate answers. The ripple effect is across the organization.”
Yet, Rajagopal noted, market data can be an ‘orphan child’ in transformation programs; a critical, high-cost function that’s too often deprioritized in favor of more visible projects.
“If this were a payments system or another critical platform, banks would pour billions into transformation. But market data too often gets pushed down the priority list…”
The ultimate goal is simple: spend less time managing data, and more time maximizing it – at the strategic end of the continuum.
That means having the time and insight to deepen vendor relationships, challenge service duplication, find cost-effective alternatives without sacrificing quality and being more attuned with business needs.
“The only way to be a truly strategic market data leader,” Trip said, “is to have the headspace to ask the right questions, not just the time to tick the boxes.”
Freeing up 30–40% of operational capacity isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about moving talent away from repetitive tasks and into work that shapes the future of the business.
In other words: don’t just wear the ‘Do more with less’ T-shirt. Rewrite what it means.