Are you managing market data–or just paying for it?
February 18, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO
Spend enough time around market data negotiations and you start to notice a pattern. The conversations are serious. The stakes are high. The preparation is thorough. And yet, when the discussion actually happens, many firms walk away feeling like the outcome was largely predetermined.
That isn’t a criticism of vendors. It’s a reflection of market structure. The reality is that much of the industry operates in environments where supplier concentration is high, switching costs are real, and operational dependency runs deep. In those conditions, leverage can feel limited. You show up prepared—but you’re still negotiating inside someone else’s gravity. Over time, that experience creates a subtle but important question worth asking: Are we actively managing our market data strategy—or are we primarily reacting to it?
The price taker dynamic
Most organizations won’t describe themselves this way, but many operate with some degree of price-taker behavior. It shows up in familiar forms, renewals approached as inevitabilities rather than choices, negotiations constrained by limited visibility into alternatives, internal uncertainty about who is using what—and why. Furthermore, asset management firms find difficulty quantifying true dependency and value of specific datasets and continue to be concerned about disruption risk outweighing exploration. None of this reflects weak management. It reflects complexity.
Market data ecosystems have evolved into interconnected environments where licensing structures, redistribution rules, workflow integration, and regulatory expectations make decisions multi-dimensional. This complexity often narrows perceived optionality—and perceived optionality is what shapes negotiating posture. When optionality feels limited, leverage tends to follow.
The emotional reality no one talks about
There’s also a human element here that doesn’t often make it into industry writing. Negotiating without full context can feel uncomfortable, not knowing whether overlap exists elsewhere in the organization, not being certain how widely data is relied upon or truly valued, not having a clear picture of redistribution exposure, and not fully understanding vendor sensitivity to usage changes. In those situations, even experienced professionals can feel like they’re navigating partially in the dark. Ultimately, when visibility isn’t complete, caution becomes rational, exploration narrows, and status quo persists. That’s not failure—that’s responsible risk management, but it does reinforce the power imbalance.
A market that is quietly changing
What makes this moment interesting is that the landscape is evolving—even if slowly. Data overlap is increasing, specialist providers are emerging, ESG and alternative datasets are diversifying, distribution models are shifting, and vendor attitudes toward redistribution and usage transparency vary. The result? The ecosystem is becoming more dynamic.
That doesn’t mean switching is easy. It doesn’t mean incumbents are vulnerable, and it certainly doesn’t mean leverage appears automatically. What it does mean is that opportunity exists—but only for organizations positioned to recognize and act on it, and that positioning depends on insight.
The questions that separate reaction from strategy
In our experience, the difference between reacting to vendor structures and engaging strategically often comes down to answering a handful of difficult questions with confidence:
- Do we know exactly who is using each dataset across the organization?
- Do we understand why they’re using it?
- Where overlap or substitution potential exists?
- Whether redistribution patterns create vendor sensitivity or flexibility?
- Which contracts introduce concentration risk?
- How dependent workflows truly are on specific sources?
- Enter discussions informed
- Understand dependency exposure
- Recognize overlap
- Model scenarios
- Evaluate redistribution implications
- Make intentional decisions
Power, in this context, isn’t about disruption. It’s about agency. Market data will likely remain a concentrated and specialized domain. That isn’t changing overnight. But the experience of operating within that structure isn’t fixed. Organizations aren’t limited to being passive participants in it. The difference between simply paying for market data and strategically managing it often comes down to how clearly a firm understands its own environment—its usage, its dependencies, its optionality. While market structure shapes the negotiation landscape, internal visibility shapes how confidently you move within it. Sometimes, the most meaningful shift isn't changing vendors.
It’s changing your position at the table, and we are here to support your decision making. Reach out to schedule time to chat about how you are thinking about market data in 2026. We’d love to hear from you.