The Cost of Inaction
May 18, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO
If your firm has $100Bn AUM, whether you know/believe/are told it or not, you are probably paying over $10M a year on data and applications and overspending by $1.5M–$2M.
You're not alone. Financial Service firms negotiate with vendors blind. Vendors hold all the cards, and you pay the cost.
Your team managing this data and these applications don’t really know how, who or why most of the services are used and what value they are to the business units they support. It is also very rare for these people to have the mandate to make significant changes. For them, downgrading the wrong thing or pulling the wrong plug could very easily cost them their job. So even when the business is aligned to take back some control, and the instruction to reduce cost is clear, there is still internal inertia and human instinct that pushes back, it is inevitable and self-preservation.
The gap between a well-run data estate and a median one is not marginal, typically it can be measured in $100’s of thousands or even $ millions of spend in duplicate and redundant services and deficient contracts across the organisation. You might think that AI is fundamentally changing this, but AI is only as good as the data that it can access, and in most cases the data and intelligence is too dispersed, siloed, and unstructured across organisations to make it effective without a huge amount of manual lifting.
Looking further out, there is also no way to really benchmark what is being done today with what needs to happen tomorrow to keep you ahead or just abreast of your peers, in terms of costs, usage rights, alternative providers, and no amount of AI is going to help if the data doesn’t exist or is unavailable outside your organization.
If your goals for the business include making significant cost reductions across the organization or the proactive growth of the business, then there are few better places to start than getting a handle on your external data and applications spend and starting to measure their ROI. Right now, many of these services are a millstone around the necks of those who manage, try to find/use them and even more for those that pay for them!