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

The Proof is in the Pudding

Subscribe to our newsletter

Lunch – London, so curry, of course – with a disillusioned reference data friend the other day leads us to take stock a bit of where this reference data marketplace has arrived, and from whence it came.

Reference Data Review will be four years old this year. Looking back over the archive – as we do as we put together each issue – we find a unique and valuable treasure trove. But not just of data or information, not just the facts of the evolution of this marketplace. Rather, what will continue to make Reference Data Review unique is our cataloguing of the attitudes of the players within the marketplace as they have twisted and changed over time.

Four years isn’t a very long time. But in reference data it’s been an age. When we started out with Reference Data Review, it was a little-known backwater, really, of the much more sexy and lucrative market data industry, an area we knew well from years of experience within it. Today, it’s a recognized, perhaps mature, subsegment of the financial data marketplace. One that’s possibly overcrowded with too many me-too events, and a raft of bottom-feeders struggling to get in on the act.

But the plus side is how the market’s attitude has evolved from those early days of Reference Data Review. Then, it was all about definitions, approaches, corporate governance, buy-in and ROI. It was about Powerpoint presentations, vapourware and acquisitions of major centralized databases that ultimately faded and died.

Of course, it still is about all those things. But on top of that, our industry now routinely throws up real implementations. This issue, for example, lists a range of projects, ranging from the mighty – ING – to the not so. And this is only the deals we managed to squeeze into this month’s 16+ pages.

So why was our reference data friend so reticent?

Perhaps because of the slow pace of change, in the face of a myriad compelling reasons why financial institutions should tear out their ageing IT infrastructures and replace them with architectures that make data a help rather than a hindrance? That’s part of it.

What’s transpiring from all the white papers, trade conference presentations, operations group powerpoints and, indeed, contributed Reference Data Review articles, is that many of the projects being undertaken by real people in the marketplace aren’t always the over-arching, architecture-busting sea-change implementations that many in our space had envisioned. Rather, they’re highly selective deals, aimed at addressing a very specific business issue. Much like most business projects should be, really. Is it time, then, to pack our bags and go home? Of course not. We just need to get used to operating in what is turning out to be the equilibrium state of the industry, where reference data projects are conducted to deal with practical problems. Nothing wrong in that.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Navigating a Complex World: Best Data Practices in Sanctions Screening

5 November 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes As rising geopolitical uncertainty prompts an intensification in the complexity and volume of global economic and financial sanctions, banks and financial institutions are faced with a daunting set of new compliance challenges. The risk of inadvertently engaging with sanctioned securities has...

BLOG

PE Deal Failures Highlight Importance of Private Data, Says JMAN Group

The critical importance of data to the private equity and alternatives markets sector is starkly underlined by an observation from Anush Newman, chief executive and co-founder of JMAN Group. “In the past 18 months, I know of at least 20 acquisition deals that have fallen through because the target companies didn’t have enough data to...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 9th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...