About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

How to Tackle the Exorbitant Cost of Sourcing and Cleansing Market Data

Subscribe to our newsletter

The financial industry spends $28.5 billion on externally sourced market data and a further $2-3 billion cleaning it up so that is can be used internally. Why is this so difficult and costly, and what can the industry and market participants do about it?

Peter Moss, CEO of the SmartStream Reference Data Utility (RDU), will discuss the problems of market data and some potential solutions during a keynote presentation at A-Team Group’s London Data Management Summit on Thursday 21 March 2019.

Moss suggests that in a market where products are defined by data and traded using data mechanisms, the data should be standardised – but this is not the case due to factors such as differences in securities identifiers, a lack of identifiers in some capital markets, data attributes represented differently across data sources, problems with classification, and different identifiers for market participants – the LEI, by way of example, is a global identifier that is only mandated across Europe, so adoption has been patchy outside Europe.

On top of these problems, Moss notes the fluidity of capital markets, in which products are created and dropped on a continuous basis, and the impact on equity data of a constant stream of corporate actions.

He says: “It is very difficult to maintain all the data that is required in a straightforward way across an organisation. The truth is that data standards are not precise enough in an environment where data comes from a huge number of sources. Data vendors pull some of the data together, but it is not possible for a firm to get all required data from one source, which becomes a challenge for the firm.”

As well as considering these challenges during his keynote, Moss will discuss industry initiatives and firms efforts’ to improve matters, and the potential of utilities to short circuit some of the problems and provide firms with cleansed data.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Best practice approaches to data management for regulatory reporting

Effective regulatory reporting requires firms to manage vast amounts of data across multiple systems, regions, and regulatory jurisdictions. With increasing scrutiny from regulators and the rising complexity of financial instruments, the need for a streamlined and strategic approach to data management has never been greater. Financial institutions must ensure accuracy, consistency, and timeliness in their...

BLOG

Standards and Identifiers Help to Prevent ‘Data Chaos’: Webinar Preview

Financial institutions’ absorption of ever-greater volumes of data, and their utilisation of it in a surging number of use cases, is putting strains on their data management processes. Taking the friction out of those workflows can improve performance substantially. But the absence of a unified international set of standards to ensure all data used by...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit New York

The AI in Capital Markets Summit will explore current and emerging trends in AI, the potential of Generative AI and LLMs and how AI can be applied for efficiencies and business value across a number of use cases, in the front and back office of financial institutions. The agenda will explore the risks and challenges of adopting AI and the foundational technologies and data management capabilities that underpin successful deployment.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...