6 key takeaways from market data fireside chat
Insights from our recent fireside chat with the Pier Sourcing Group
April 21, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO
On April 16, we hosted a fireside chat with leaders from Pier Sourcing Group to discuss the new economics of market data. The conversation focused on what's actually happening across asset managers right now: rising vendor concentration, tighter compliance scrutiny, AI-driven change, and mounting internal pressure to justify spend. Firms are overspending by 15–25% without realizing it — and the vendor invoice is rarely the whole story. Here are the six themes that defined the discussion
Inefficiency accumulates slowly - and silently
Cost and compliance problems in market data rarely stem from a single bad decision. More often, they're the product of slow accumulation: entitlement creep, legacy services, and unused datasets that compound over time unnoticed.
Part of what makes this hard to unwind is that the value of each vendor relationship is rarely well understood or defined. Value is multi-dimensional - beyond price, it includes usability, workflow fit, and the use-cases that it is being purposed for.
Audits start with inventory - and education
You can't fix what you can't see. The foundation of any rationalization effort is a clean inventory: what data exists, how it's entering the firm, and who's actually using it - and what for.
Documentation alone isn't enough. Roughly one in five people you work with will genuinely engage with compliance guidance. Ensuring firm-wide compliance requires the market data team to be the expert in the room - with contracts centralized, terms understood, and entitlements clearly documented. Teams that operate this way aren't just keeping the lights on. They're adding real, measurable value.
Build vs. buy: the gap that grows over time
Internal tools solve the problem in front of you at a point in time - until the environment evolves. The environment for applications and data are both dynamic which leads to widening gap between what a firm thinks it is managing versus what's actually happening across its data environment. Institutional knowledge degrades. Licensing changes. The system stops reflecting reality.
Beyond data and license quality, many firms face a second constraint: IT resources to maintain home-grown administrative systems. When you invest in a third-party platform, you're not just buying software - you're buying into a support network. Building applications is getting ever easier, maintaining them and ensuring that you have continuity of services once they are deployed is very different and not something that comes as standard with internal builds.
AI: where it helps, and where it doesn't
AI is genuinely useful for surfacing patterns, flagging inconsistencies, and accelerating analysis - but only when it has structured, accurate inputs. Licensing interpretation, vendor negotiation strategy, and workflow context still require experienced human judgment. The risk isn't always missing the obvious; it's misinterpreting something subtle.
AI also doesn't store data. To extract real value in market data management, you need an interconnected system drawing from contracts, entitlements, usage data, and invoices in one place. Without that foundation, you're running one-off analyses - not building intelligence.
Operating model: structure matters less than governance
There's no universal org structure for market data teams. The common denominator across high-performing programs is operating discipline - continuous day-to-day management, not periodic cleanup. The best setups combine strong tooling with people who genuinely know the space. How the team is structured matters far less than how it operates.
Negotiate from a position of knowledge
uccessful vendor renewals are won before you ever sit at the table. That means starting early - with a clear picture of users, usage, terms and conditions, stakeholder feedback, and alternative providers. Evaluating alternatives takes time: compliance reviews, negotiations, and implementation don't happen overnight.
Here's the asymmetry that matters: vendors maintain detailed usage data on every client. Firms that walk in without that same visibility are negotiating blind. The firms that consistently get the best outcomes understand their usage, workflow dependencies, and internal priorities well in advance - not at the renewal table.
These themes reflect conversations happening across the industry right now. If any of them resonate with challenges you're facing, we'd welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation.