Market Data Technology Innovation: Bigger Data, Simpler Solutions, Better Functionality

The complexity and cost of accessing global market data continues to weigh heavily on capital markets participants. Today, market data consumers must contend with constant market structure transformation as well as increasing competitive pressures to be able to digest gargantuan amounts of data more quickly than ever before. With these pressures come new challenges; for capital markets, this is the equivalent of the big data phenomenon. We are in a Cambrian Age of new data sources and limitless, untapped potential.

With the hunt for new sources of performance and savings reaching a fever pitch, significant improvements in market data fluency – and all data fluency, as well - simply must be part of the formula for success going forward. Innovations that balance lower costs with increased levels of performance, increasingly broad scope and depth, and improved functionality absolutely must be central to next-generation solutions for all market data consumers.

There are several themes that fall under the market data technology innovations umbrella. TABB Group believes that the three key themes include 1) managed services and the balancing of both unified and bifurcated market data infrastructure, 2) “comprehensive data ecosystems” where strong breadth and depth of global market data is coupled with application development technology to intelligently consume that data, and 3) enhanced user management to minimize the costs of unused market data.

This TABB Group Focus Note, Market Data Technology Innovation: Bigger Data, Simpler Solutions, Better Functionality, we detail the main drivers of the shift in the market data landscape and, based on those, paint a picture of what the optimal market data platform would look like. From there, we detail which areas of market data technology innovation match up while with the key attributes of the optimal solution, as well as a series of secondary and tertiary innovations that are worthy of watching closely over time.