Evolve the Process and Capture What Matters
Why better process creates better Market Data teams
June 22, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO
Noboby working in Market Data needs to be told that process matters. The people leading these teams have spent years navigating increasingly complex vendor relationships, managing renewals, responding to audits, controlling costs, and supporting hundreds – sometimes thousands – of users across the business. They understand the operational reality better than anyone.
But what is changing, however, is what the business now demands from Market Data teams.
The role is no longer simply about managing vendors efficiently. Today’s firms expect Market Data teams to provide strategic insight – helping the business better understand where money is being spent, whether services are delivering value, where risks exist, and where opportunities can be identified.
This shift requires a different way of thinking.
Process is no longer the end goal. Many Market Data teams are exceptionally good at moving from A to B: a new request arrives, a subscription is approved, a contract is renewed, an entitlement is updated. The work gets done. But if experienced teams spend most of their time executing process, they have very little time left to improve it.
The real opportunity is creating enough operational efficiency that the team can focus on higher-value activities – advising stakeholders, identifying unnecessary spend, negotiating stronger contracts, identifying and assessing alternative vendors, preparing for renewals months in advance, and reducing commercial and compliance risk.
In other words, process should create capacity – not consume it.
Seeing Market Data through the business lense
One of the biggest challenges we see among leading firms is a shift in perspective. Rather than viewing Market Data purely through contracts, subscriptions, and entitlements, successful teams increasingly map services to business use cases. How does a portfolio manager use this data? Which trading workflow depends on this feed? What happens if a vendor changes licensing terms? What are our risks and liabilities? Where does friction exist today? Understanding these workflows changes the relationship between Market Data and the business. The team becomes a trusted advisor helping business units make more informed, better decisions.
Why process matters more than ever
Market Data remains one of the largest discretionary technology expenditures across financial services. Yet many firms still manage it with limited visibility. And in most cases, vendors typically know more about your usage, licensing position, and commercial leverage than you do. Quite simply, without a structured process, complexity quickly becomes difficult to manage and control.
Where better process delivers immediate value
- Cost control – effective process makes it easier to identify duplicate services, unused licenses and subscriptions, inactive users, and unnecessary spend.
- Contract management – capturing key contractual terms, renewal dates, notice periods, pricing escalators, and licensing restrictions creates far stronger negotiating positions.
- Audit readiness – vendor audits rarely arrive at a convenient time. Maintaining clear records of entitlements, usage, approvals, and historical changes dramatically reduces risk and internal disruption. Good documentation turns audits from high-stress events into manageable business process.
- Operational resilience – every Market Data team carries some degree of risk. If critical knowledge lives in spreadsheets, or inside inboxes, or even in someone’s head, the organisation becomes vulnerable. Well designed process preserves institutional knowledge.
Building a better process doesn’t require reinventing everything; it starts with creating a reliable foundation:
- Create a single source of truth – centralise contracts, subscriptions, entitlements, costs, vendors, and users in one central place that is easily accessible, searchable, and automatically maintained.
- Standardise recurring work – document repeatable workflows for renewals, onboarding, offboarding, contract reviews, due diligence, approvals, and vendor requests. Consistency is key.
- Connect usage to business value – understanding who uses a service, and why, is just as important as knowing what it costs. Regularly reviewing business use cases prevents unnecessary spending and supports better vendor decisions.
- Benchmark data - internal data only tells part of the story. Understand how your costs, commercial terms, and vendor landscape compare with similar firms. Furthermore, it could create opportunity.
- Automate – connect all internal systems – ERP, procurement tools, finance systems, and contract repositories where possible. This will reduce manual work, improve data quality, and free up your team's time.
The ultimate objective isn't creating more process, it's about creating a better process. When repetitive operational work is streamlined, Market Data teams can spend more time reducing costs, improving governance, strengthening vendor negotiations, supporting AI initiatives, and helping the business make better decisions. That's where the greatest value is created.
Sidelight works with many Market Data teams. We often find that their biggest challenge is rarely expertise, it’s actually that too much of their time is consumed by manual admiration, fragmented systems, and disconnected information. We help remove those barriers by making Market Data teams be seen as a strategic partner that delivers measurable commercial value, by building better processes, better visibility, and better decisions.