Infrastructure and connectivity provider Transaction Network Services (TNS) has introduced a new solution aimed at helping buy-side and sell-side firms reduce market data expenses. The Data Usage Optimizer (DUO) offers detailed market data usage reports, identifying unused subscriptions and enabling firms to cut costs by deactivating inactive data feeds.
DUO integrates TNS’ market data monitoring expertise with its expansive network infrastructure, enabling firms to track employee-level data usage. By highlighting underutilised subscriptions, organisations can optimise their spending on market data services.
Vendor-neutral
Last November, TNS acquired West Highland Support Services with a vision to expand its capabilities beyond network infrastructure. Previously, TNS was primarily focused on distributing market data and managing networks, leaving customers responsible for integrating their own market data applications. The acquisition allowed TNS to combine its infrastructure expertise with West Highland’s deep knowledge of enterprise market data systems, creating a more comprehensive solution for clients.
“TNS has always been a vendor-neutral service provider,” says Jeff Mezger, Vice President of Product Development for TNS’s Financial Markets business, in conversation with TradingTech Insight. “We don’t have proprietary trading or market data software. Our philosophy has been to work with any application, letting customers choose the tools that best meet their needs. West Highland shared this philosophy, so following the acquisition we saw an opportunity to integrate TNS’s infrastructure services with West Highland’s application expertise, creating a ‘one-stop shop’ for both.”
Entitlements Management
A critical challenge faced by financial firms is the complexity and cost of managing market data entitlements, notes Mezger. “Market data spend is often the largest line item in a firm’s trading operations. These firms have hundreds or thousands of users spread across multiple locations, using a mix of market data platforms and exchange products. Each of these feeds and products comes with a cost.”
Mezger points out that firms report monthly entitlements to vendors and exchanges and are billed accordingly, but these bills are generally based on who can access data, not who is actually using it, leading to ‘dead weight loss’, i.e. costs incurred for unused market data entitlements.
“Firms struggle to track which users no longer needed access to specific feeds or whose trading strategies had changed, leading to unnecessary expenses,” he says.” We developed the Data Usage Optimizer to address this situation, by analysing entitlement data alongside actual network usage. It reconciles what users are authorised to access with their actual activity, generating actionable reports that identify unused subscriptions and highlight opportunities to eliminate unnecessary spending and reduce costs.”
Market Data as a Service
The release of DUO coincides with the launch of TNS Market Data as a Service (MDaaS), a vendor-agnostic solution offering managed infrastructure for market data applications. MDaaS provides hosting, feed support services, and integration with client systems. It also includes 24/7 monitoring and proactive alerts.
“TNS Market Data as a Service extends the company’s capabilities beyond infrastructure management to include the oversight of market data applications, offering financial firms a fully integrated solution,” says Mezger. “One of these tools is the Data Notification Manager, a platform designed to streamline the often-overwhelming volume of notifications from exchanges and vendors. Exchanges and vendors regularly send updates—API changes, new symbols, or other adjustments—that can feel like a firehose of information. Our tool consolidates those notifications into a single, unified view and provides workflows to distribute them to the appropriate team members responsible for actioning them.”
MDaaS builds on this software capability by taking application management a step further, notes Mezger. “In addition to managing the infrastructure, we now manage the applications running on that infrastructure as well. This allows firms to rely on TNS for a holistic approach to market data delivery, simplifying operations and reducing the complexity of managing both hardware and software in-house. By combining robust tools like the Data Notification Manager with comprehensive application management capabilities, MDaaS offers firms an efficient, vendor-neutral way to optimise their market data ecosystems.”
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