Among these many questions:
- What forces shaped market data management in the last 12 months? What about the next few months and years?
- In 2025, what dynamics will persist or shift between market data vendors and consumers?
- Is there new technology that holds any magic answers (even beyond AI)?
- How does our experience with the changing role of the CDO impact client engagement?
- How can the market data function contribute more to bottom-line results and business value creation?
- Will 2025 finally be the year market data administration is seen as a strategic value creator, and not just a cost center?
This new monthly newsletter, hosted on LinkedIn (don't forget to subscribe), aims to go beyond mere talk of products and services to look at industry dynamics, forces at work, what makes market data so complex for B2B buyers, and possible answers ─ plus some of our own watercooler conversations and what we’re learning as we talk to market data leaders and practitioners, fellow experts and industry organizations across the globe.
This month we delve into:
- A practical AI use case for market data management: rights management and analysis
- Our observations on the changing role of the CDO (inspired by a series from Waters Technology)
“Can we use AI to fix it?” “What about AI?” “What’s our plan?” “What’s our competition doing in AI?” “Are our vendors taking advantage of AI?”
For a good two years or so at least, these refrains having been coming down from the board down and echoing through organizations across the globe. But 2024 was the year science fiction became science fact and the first fledgling products using AI made their market data industry debut.
Be it authored content written by AI, or as we have seen early in 2025, news headlines aggregated by AI, vendors big and small have been explaining and defending their plans to building large language models and creating AI assistants that help all manner of front-office workflows, from trading to banking pitches.
So where is AI’s real impact and promise for market data?
While market data professionals will be asked to assess many products for AI capabilities, a key question to bear in mind is this: where can AI be focused to provide better value for where the business is right now, whether the business is struggling to get any sort of handle on the cost and administrative burden of market data management or it’s fairly evolved?
One promising and pragmatic use case: rights management and analysis (RM&A)
There are early entrants in this space, such as those using AI to explain what a license allows the business to do with content or testing that a proposed data use case is valid.
This process has changed a lot over the years, as have the people doing it. There’s a gap and there’s new risks, and this is where AI can help.
Gone are the days of financial institutions having IP-specialist legal counsel with market data contract expertise sitting alongside market data teams. Many companies found it too expensive and an unpopular distraction for in-house counsel when they could be doing glitterier, client-facing deal work.
Now, the most common model is to outsource rights management and analysis to third-party legal counsel or legally literate lay persons (often experienced procurement/market data managers who waded through enough contracts and learned enough from their former legal counsel) to offer an informed opinion. So, when the business – if they remember to ask – wants to check whether a license permits an anticipated usage, they have a choice: engage expensive external counsel for a true legal view, or tie up a highly skilled, well compensated internal resource to try and get an educated but ultimately unqualified opinion.
“In recent months we’ve seen the beginnings of AI as a powerful potential alternative to external legal counsel or internal evaluations by SMEs who know market data but are not trained in IP law. This is showing up as AI solutions that let users submit contract sets (MSAs and associated orders/schedules and exhibits), then posit a real or hypothetical use case for a view on whether it’s permitted or prohibited. They can also quickly reveal whether the agreement is silent on the use case in question”
It’s our view that there are likely to be multiple entrants into the RM&A market with large language models that cover various popular legal jurisdictions. We would also expect the beginnings of usage mining (i.e., using AI to summarize all permitted uses within an agreement, which can then be cross referenced against existing business uses to identify areas where a license is not being fully utilized).
While none of these views represent or replace human legal opinion, they may well provide sufficient risk analysis for advancing business projects and speeding up development processes.
As inspiration for this article, we tip our hat to the excellent series of articles published by waterstechnology.com, Voice of the CDO.
In early 2024 we started noticing the increasing presence of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) in conversations about market data oversight and management. The common theme in these conversations: ensuring their business extracted maximum value from the data consumed and investigating what tools were required to achieve that goal.
The sheer volume of touchpoints our team had which required CDO involvement validates Waters Technology’s conclusion that the industry trend is towards the CDO being the eyes and ears of the executive tier in market-data-related matters, particularly governance and value creation – whether just as advisors or taking a seat on the vendor selection panel – they have become a key voice, and one we welcome to the conversation.
“Like the previous question of procurement vs. cost and usage controls, the question of where market data best sits organizationally is unlikely to be resolved down to a one-size-fits all answer.”
When engaging with CDOs, it’s essential to remember that no two CDOs are alike. Why is that? The CDO role is a relatively new entrant into the senior tiers of client decision-making structures, thus they tend to come from diverse backgrounds. We have encountered former data scientists, business managers, variations of CTO/CIO, or even market data professionals – and often continuing to wear multiple other hats while they do so. In our experience, CDOs with differing backgrounds respond to different value indicators. They may have a common outcome in mind but can see very different paths to get there. This makes it ever more important to understand their points of view and tailor interactions accordingly.
So, while there are still many interested parties when it comes to ownership of the market data function in all its many forms – it’s evident that, for now, CDOs are the market data whisperers of choice and a key audience for the supplier market. Their objectives and concerns should be front and center when talking about market data management technology and services.
Join the conversation! What’s on your mind? Did we get it right? Have a comment, or a topic you’d like to see us cover? We’d love to hear from you!
