The most expensive line item in market data isn’t in your budget
February 25, 2026 | Charles Ashwanden, Co-Founder & CEO
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with firms about market data spend — and the conversation almost always starts in the same place: vendor cost. These conversations often lead to questions like How much are we paying? Where can we negotiate? What can we cut?
That’s understandable. These are real numbers, often material ones. And they’re visible — they show up in budgets, invoices, and board discussions. But over the years I’ve come to believe the biggest cost in market data management isn’t vendor pricing at all. It’s operational.
It’s the time, effort, friction, and complexity that accumulate around managing that spend — and in most organizations, those costs are never measured or tracked and rarely discussed. Yet they’re substantial.
The trap: Is this a pricing problem?
Reducing vendor costs has become the default lens through which firms approach optimization. It’s tangible. It’s reportable. It feels like progress. But cost reduction alone doesn’t necessarily translate into efficiency.
I’ve seen organizations achieve negotiated savings while still operating in environments where:
- Contract terms are scattered across documents
- Usage visibility is partial at best
- Renewal timelines sneak up unexpectedly
- Knowledge sits with individuals rather than systems
- Decision-making is reactive
In those situations, the underlying operational burden hasn’t changed — it’s just been masked by a better rate card. Managing market data effectively isn’t purely a financial exercise. It’s an organizational one.
Where the real cost shows up
Across the industry, governance is still heavily reliant on tools and workflows that were never designed for strategic oversight–spreadsheets, email chains, manual reconciliations, institutional memory, static documentation, and the list goes on. None of this is unusual — in fact, it’s the norm, but it carries consequences.
Time that quietly adds up
Highly skilled professionals — procurement, data managers, finance, legal, compliance and even business teams — spend significant time investigating and tracking entitlements, interpreting contract language, preparing renewal analyses, and reconciling vendor information. Individually, these tasks seem manageable. Cumulatively, they represent a meaningful drain on productivity.
Fragmented understanding
Market data touches multiple parts of the organization, but visibility is rarely unified. Insights are partial, context is distributed, and alignment requires coordination that slows momentum.
Renewal pressure
Without forward visibility, renewals often become deadline-driven exercises. Negotiations occur under time constraints, mostly without complete clarity around usage or alternatives.
Dependency on individuals
Much of the time, the most important knowledge about vendor structures exists primarily in someone’s head (or on their local hard drive!) When roles change, that continuity is disrupted — and the organization absorbs the impact.
The bottom line: none of these issues appear on a balance sheet, but all of them affect performance.
Productivity is the metric we don't talk about enough
Historically, success in market data management has been measured in negotiated savings. And that’s a useful metric — but it’s not the full picture. A question I think firms are asking more often now is:
- How much organizational effort goes into maintaining our current state?
- How quickly can we access reliable spend and associated vendor intelligence?
- How confidently can we model vendor scenarios?
- How aligned are our data investments with business priorities?
These are productivity and risk questions. And they speak to operational maturity. In my experience, improving productivity frequently creates more lasting value than incremental cost reductions. It shifts teams out of maintenance mode and into decision-making mode. That’s where leverage lives.
Administration vs strategy
There’s an important distinction between administering market data and strategically managing it. Administration is about keeping things running–validating invoices, tracking licenses, processing renewals, and maintaining records. Whereas strategy is about enabling outcomes–understanding spend dynamics, identifying optimization opportunities, supporting negotiation positioning, and connecting data investments to business direction.
Most organizations start in administrative mode. That’s natural. But as complexity grows, staying there becomes increasingly expensive — not financially, but operationally.
Reframing the objective
The industry conversation may be due for a shift. Instead of centering on How do we reduce vendor costs? A more useful framing might be How effectively are we managing the value and productivity of our data investments?
That perspective expands the aperture. It brings visibility, infrastructure, and organizational capability into the discussion. And it acknowledges that spend alone doesn’t define performance — how that spend is governed does.
The most expensive line item in market data management often isn’t contractual. It’s structural, it’s procedural, it’s human. It’s the accumulated cost of manual coordination, limited visibility, and operational friction.
As firms continue modernizing their investment infrastructure, the opportunity may not lie solely in reducing spend — but in elevating how that spend is understood, managed, and aligned with strategic objectives. Because sometimes the biggest cost isn’t what you pay vendors. It’s what your organization spends managing the complexity around them.
Many firms are beginning to evaluate how operational maturity impacts their market data outcomes. If you’re exploring similar questions, we’re always open to sharing perspectives and would love to connect.
Alternatively, take a look at our Contracts AI walkthrough to get a feel for how we are helping asset management firms take control of their market data subscriptions and applications.