This is the 4th edition of our industry newsletter with musings, observations and ideas regarding the challenges and opportunities facing market data management leaders.
Expert Q&A: The 3 Vs you can’t afford to ignore
Velocity. Volume. Value. One’s moving too fast. One’s piling up. One’s quietly killing your ability to manage your market data program strategically.
We understand you don’t need another article explaining the problem. You’re living it. The speed of change. The sheer volume of new data products and vendor compliance demands. The pressure to justify every line item. The question isn’t “What’s wrong?” It’s “What’s next?”
Because for many firms, the current model of market data program management isn’t just creaking. It’s cracking. And if you look closely, the signs are everywhere ─ in firms in every country and of all sizes.
We sat down with Deepak Rajagopal, TRG Screen’s Global Head of Managed Services, to explore what he sees changing, what he thinks is being missed, and what needs to happen next.
What’s keeping the current market data program management model in place, and what’s causing it to fail quietly behind the scenes?
What perpetuates the current model is a decades-old story – it’s familiar, and it often works just well enough to suffice. (But that doesn’t mean it’s efficient.) As companies look to transform their core functions for efficiency and operational cost reductions, other corporate functions tend to get priority before market data transformation. And when their turn comes, it can be difficult for market data teams and business leadership to reach a common and realistic understanding of the time and investment required to effect real change.
Yet with transformation delayed and budgets often scarce, market data teams are still on the receiving end of constant questions from senior management as to what they’re spending and why. The business wants insight, not just oversight. Strategic value, not admin. And that’s the work only internal market data experts are best positioned to deliver and optimize – like evaluating new use cases or pushing back on data vendor requests.
What’s failing is the ability to scale or adapt to those demands and conflicting pressures. Most teams are still stuck in transactional, administrative tasks, unable to rise above the noise.
The result? A growing gap between what’s expected by business stakeholders and what’s possible. That’s where the cracks are showing. And if firms don’t confront it, those cracks won’t just widen, they may potentially break the whole thing open due to increased costs of right-sizing contracts, more penalties for breaches in usage agreements, and other likely impacts.
You talk about this idea of the 3 Vs – velocity, volume, and value – as signals. What do you mean by that?
They’re pressure indicators for market data teams, and they’re compounding.
Velocity is the speed of change. New products, shifting regulations, economic shifts – they’re forcing firms to pivot fast, and that pressure ripples straight through to market data.
Volume follows. New strategies mean more data, more feeds, more approvals, more admin. It gets noisy, fast.
Value is where the pressure peaks. As costs rise, the business starts asking: What are we actually getting for this massive spend? And that’s where many firms stall, because they often don’t have the visibility or capacity to answer.
Of the three, which one is the silent killer?
Value, without question. It’s the one firms assume will take care of itself. But it doesn’t.
Velocity and volume are obvious. You feel them in the speed of change and the weight of admin. But value slips through the cracks. Not because it’s less important, but because it’s harder to pin down.
The real risk isn’t just overspending – it’s invisibility. If you can’t prove impact, you lose relevance to the C-suite. That’s something internal teams have to do for themselves. A partner can surface the data and insight. But turning that into ROI, into strategic influence, has to come from someone who understands the business.
And if your team is still buried in admin, they won’t have the time or headspace to do it. That’s why value is the one that catches many firms off guard and does the most damage when it does.
Those firms that are evolving their approach to market data, what are they doing differently?
They’re responding to each of the 3 Vs with intentionality:
On velocity, they’re building adaptability into their operating model – not trying to predict every shift but setting themselves up to respond faster when things do shift.
On volume, they’re filtering. Automating what can be automated. Delegating what doesn’t require deep institutional knowledge.
On value, they’re unlocking capacity. Freeing up their people from manual and mundane tasks to challenge spend, validate requests, and uncover smarter solutions – adding value to their business.
In short: they’re not clinging to control. They’re designing for capability. They’re maturing what it means to be a market data support team from a reactive processing hub to a proactively driven center for understanding cost drivers, strategic management, and future proofing. And it’s unlocking real gains–not just in cost, but in time, focus and influence within the business.
What’s the conversation market data leaders need to start, or stop avoiding?
Most market data leaders already know what they should be focusing on: driving value. That’s not the issue. But they’re often still stuck doing the admin-heavy things. So, the conversation is about what’s getting in the way of delivering value. And in most cases, it’s not mindset. It’s capacity.
Leaders need to ask: What are we still doing that someone else – or something else – could handle better? Many haven’t made that shift. Not because they don’t see the need, but because they haven’t made the space to act on it.
And if they don’t make that shift? What’s the risk?
The risk is getting left behind – not by competitors, but by automation. AI and automation are already chipping away at the manual tasks that market data teams have historically owned. Invoice processing, inventory management, order fulfilment can all be done faster and cheaper by machines, and let humans do what they do best: strategy, proactive thinking, business resiliency.
So, the question becomes: What can your people do that AI can’t?
That’s where the future relevance of the market data function lies – in strategic judgment, vendor negotiation, cost optimization and value creation. Put it this way – if you’re still defining your value by how well you process, rather than how well you advise, you’re on borrowed time.
So, where should firms start? What’s the most practical first move?
You don’t need a full transformation to start creating value. The thought of that can be overwhelming, understandably.
The smart move is to attack the highest opportunity tasks first. Look for areas that are high-volume, highly repeatable, but low complexity – based on our experience, invoice processing is a perfect starting point. It's where we guide most firms to start first. It’s repetitive, it's rules-based, and it's ripe for automation or managed services. Plus, you can change your processes and technology without bringing your work to a screeching halt.
Start there. Prove the model. Free up time. Then move upstream to areas like inventory management. The change doesn’t have to be big. It just needs a spark.
When everything’s a priority, where do you start?
Start where it hurts most: why invoice processing is the smartest first move.
The cracks are showing. Velocity, volume, value – the pressure’s real. As Deepak laid out above, most market data teams around the globe aren’t short on awareness. They’re short on capacity.
If there’s any hope of scaling efficiently – or even just keeping up – process modernization is the only way forward. But here’s the good news: you don’t need a full-scale transformation to start creating noticeable business value.
You start by creating space. And most teams already know where the space (and time) has gone. It’s lost in the repetitive, manual, time-consuming admin work that eats up hours, introduces errors and delivers little return.
So, start with a big pain point. Start where the time goes. Start with invoices.
Why invoices?
Hundreds of vendors. Thousands of line items. Invoice formats that look like they were designed to confuse buyers. And the relentless cycle of manual checks, reconciliations, allocations and approvals.
It’s not just frustrating – it’s inefficient, risky and expensive. So why are so many firms still doing it the hard way?
For many, it’s simply a matter of momentum. Legacy processes feel too embedded to change. Teams often feel like they can’t pause to implement new technologies or workflows and/or worry about the cost of change. And yet this is exactly where small, smart shifts can generate outsize returns.
More automated invoice processing
Whether you do it in-house or through a managed service, automation delivers big benefits:
- Time: frees up skilled people from low-yield admin
- Accuracy: improves data quality and auditability
- Visibility: gives teams faster, deeper cost insights
- Control: enables proactive exception handling and spend governance
It’s also one of the clearest entry points for bringing the power of AI into your program in a way that delivers real, measurable value and is also secure.
And once you’ve unlocked value here? That momentum can carry you through bigger improvements – inventory management, usage management, entitlement workflows, vendor compliance management and reporting. But invoices are often the best foothold.
Picture this:
- Invoices arrive and, regardless of format, they are automatically captured and digitized.
- Key details are extracted instantly, with AI doing the heavy lifting and accuracy virtually guaranteed.
- Validation is handled based on custom rules tailored to your environment.
- Exceptions get flagged immediately.
- Humans (i.e., experts) remain at the controls to monitor and correct any issues immediately. They feed those corrections back to the AI to make it smarter and smarter about your unique universe of market data invoices and invoice data.
And instead of spending hours wrangling data, your team gets a clean, reconciled view of invoice records – ready to review, report and take action. All in less than a day. Not a month-end scramble.
This isn’t a pipe dream. It’s already happening in firms that made the decision to stop managing invoices the way they always have.
Why it matters?
This isn’t about change for the sake of it. It’s about proving there’s a better way and unlocking the space to move.
Because when your team isn’t drowning in mundane admin, they can finally focus on what only they can do: protect value, challenge spend and help the business make smarter, more data-driven decisions.
Start with what slows you down the most. Start where the time goes. Start with invoices.
Join the conversation! What’s on your mind? Did we get it right? Have a comment, or a topic you’d like to see us cover? We’d love to hear from you!
