Market Data in 2026: The Days of "Just About Managing" Are Over

The financial industry is constantly changing and evolving, and the world of market data is no exception. As providers of granular, high-quality data, we have a clear view of how demands are shifting. Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, one thing is clear: the way firms consume market data is changing materially.

The days of accepting poor-quality data are over

The era of the market "just about managing" with poor-quality historical market data is decisively over. For decades, historical data was treated as an "exhaust" product of real-time incumbents, often delivered with flaws, gaps, spikes, and packet losses. That approach is now changing, and the shift is irreversible.

High-quality, granular, and reliable data has become a prerequisite for effective research, execution, and risk management. The "buy-to-build" trend is here to stay, as firms are realising that owning, storing, and cleansing vast datasets is no longer a differentiator. Owning the data is no longer the differentiator;  it is what you build on top of trusted data that matters. 

This is most evident among sophisticated firms building AI tooling on trusted data. They are moving market focus towards production-ready data sources. By adding high-quality structured data to their stack, they can hit the ground running and immediately differentiate themselves with what they build on top of trusted data, rather than by owning and maintaining it themselves.

This means that firms need to stop using valuable quant resources for the "nitty-gritty" of data cleaning; it only drives up the total cost of ownership (TCO). Even high-frequency Trading (HFT) firms are increasingly exploring lower-frequency strategies to find new sources of alpha, requiring a depth of history and quality that raw feeds simply cannot provide.

Collaboration towards raising market data standards is now key

In this sophisticated environment, collaboration to raise the standards for market data quality must take centre stage. At BMLL, we have embraced this through our Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB).

When we expanded into the long-only buy-side and sovereign wealth funds, these firms recognised the quality of our product but demanded a line of sight on our roadmap to plan their businesses. They wanted to define what good looks like regarding symbology, protocols, and normalisation.

The CPAB was set up to bring together the world's most sophisticated firms, including asset managers, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and banks, to elevate market data standards for the benefit of the wider industry. 

And the results speak for themselves. By combining our engineering capabilities with direct feedback from the industry’s heavyweights, we identified that clients were struggling to munge different feeds together, leading us to build and launch new datasets designed to accelerate research.

A call to the industry

We remain committed to democratising access to this high-quality data across the entire industry. If you are a global systematic user of our data on the buy or sell-side, whether you’re a long-only asset manager, a sophisticated HFT, or a sell-side bank, you can join us and help raise market data standards across the industry. We look forward to working with you.