Contracts & Governance Blind-Spots

And Changing The Value of the Market Data Function

May 26, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO

We are seeing an increase in the number and nature of vendor audits in the last 6 months and certainly here in Europe an increase the instances of Compliance and Governance teams becoming more concerned around issues such as DORA.

It is not that Investment managers are slow to respond to this increased scrutiny, but the sheer scale of the work involved in ensuring that they are compliant is challenging to say the least.

With children of a certain age, I can’t think of DORA without a wry smile, but unfortunately there is little to find funny in the EU’s requirements for safeguarding against ICT-related incidents.

The challenge is made significantly trickier for firms who have relied on Excel and BOX folders for organising and managing the spaghetti of users, contracts, order forms and addendums that legacy vendor relationships bring. As an example, a small-medium sized Wealth Manager we are working with has more than 3,000 contracts to work through for 220 vendors. Another large client has just had to put their plans to organise the existing siloed approach on hold as they have had to prioritise an external audit for an index provider, the workload is so great right now.

Better structure and a more joined up approach to the whole of the Market Data space sounds too good to be true, and it does take effort to get it set up, but what we often need to make clear to senior management teams is that managing the data and application estate may get easier, but good process and systems are dynamic and they do NOT replace the intelligence that individuals bring to managing it.

Great joined-up systems allow these teams to become additive to the business rather than merely fulfilling a basic function in the eyes of the business.