Taking Control of Market Data: Mastering Usage and Cost Control

At MMG, reviews across banks and asset managers consistently reveal the same reality: firms are often overspending while exposing themselves to significant compliance and audit risks

The Growing Challenge

Vendor pricing models have become increasingly difficult to benchmark and predict. At the same time, licensing structures are growing more granular and complex, particularly around usage rights. Combined with decentralized procurement and fragmented consumption, many firms no longer have a clear view of:

• who is using which data
• for what purpose
• through which systems
• and under which contractual entitlement

The result is a combination of unnecessary spend and elevated compliance risk.

Three Patterns We Repeatedly See in Market Data Reviews

When MMG enters a market data review, the diagnosis typically surfaces the same recurring patterns. These patterns reveal where costs are leaking, where governance gaps exist, and where audit risks are hiding.

1. The Phantom User Pattern

Bloomberg seats, Refinitiv Eikon licenses, and S&P Capital IQ logins rarely disappear automatically. Employees leave or change roles, but entitlements remain active because offboarding ends in HR rather than in the market data inventory. The solution is not another one-off cleanup. It requires a live inventory connected to HR data and a clearly assigned owner responsible for regular deactivation cycles.

**Ask yourself:**When was your market data inventory last reconciled against the active employee list? If you do not have a date, you have the pattern.

2. The Usage Trap Pattern

This pattern has audit teeth. Vendor licenses distinguish among others between display use, non-display use and derived data. Many institutions however lack the visibility to distinguish actual consumption patterns. During vendor audits, the gap between contracted usage and real usage often becomes financially painful.

**Ask yourself:**Can your team produce a usage map split by display, non-display, and derived data? If not, the next vendor audit may define the gap on the vendor's terms.

3. The Parallel Procurement Pattern

Different business units often negotiate market data independently. Trading signs one vendor agreement, research negotiates another, and risk procures overlapping datasets separately. Individually, each contract appears justified. Collectively, the organization ends up with duplicated datasets, fragmented renewal cycles, and unnecessary spend. The core issue is rarely procurement capability. It is the absence of centralized ownership and consolidated visibility.

**Ask yourself:**Can someone in your organization show you all active market data contracts, by vendor, on one page? If not, you do not yet have a centralized ownership.

Why these patterns do not solve themselves

These issues are not solved through tougher vendor negotiations alone. They require transparency, clear ownership, and institution-wide visibility into data usage and entitlements. Without that foundation, vendors will often understand your consumption better than you do.

In the next articles of this MDS series, we will explore practical remediation approaches, including:

• building a reliable market data inventory
• improving entitlement classification
• establishing end-to-end ownership of the market data function.