Market Data: Everyone's Job and No One's Job

A problem most mid-market firms know they have

I’ve had the same conversation dozens of times since joining Concertiv as VP of Customer Success. Market data is one of a firm's largest operational costs, but often nobody actually owns the management of it. There’s no dedicated person, no team, no function; it’s just a line item that keeps growing and a handful of people doing their best to keep up. I’ve seen this before. In previous roles across other industries, I watched vendor complexity outpace the internal teams assigned to manage it, and market data is one of the clearest examples.

Ask who’s managing it day to day and you get a familiar, yet varied, cast: IT Directors, Controllers, CFOs, Operations Coordinators, VPs of Finance, Chief Compliance Officers, Office Managers, and in some cases Executive Assistants. All of them already have full-time jobs. A dedicated Market Data Manager, someone who owns vendor relationships, manages entitlements, reconciles invoices, and stays current on the landscape, barely exists at the mid-market level.

The result? Market data becomes everyone's job and no one's job.

The hidden cost of magic hour

What fills the gap is what I've come to think of as "magic hour": time carved out of evenings, weekends, and the margins of already-full days to deal with the administrative reality of market data. Renewal notices that need a response. Invoices that need to be reviewed. User access requests that have been sitting in a queue. And the bigger tasks that often go unnoticed altogether: auditing invoices against contracts, evaluating new vendors, and scrutinizing unused products and seats.

None of these people are market data specialists. Managing market data is one responsibility in a very long list, and it rarely rises to the top until something forces it to. At one firm managing over $1T in assets, a Managing Director told me they're the one personally adding and removing user licenses. Not overseeing it – working on it in the gaps between their actual responsibilities.

When errors compound

This isn't a failure of these individuals or their firms. It's a structural problem. Market data is genuinely complex. Vendor contracts are dense. Entitlement systems are arcane. Exchange reporting requirements have real compliance teeth. Managing this well is a full-time job, and most firms are giving it a fraction of one.

When no one owns market data full-time, things fall through the cracks. Invoices get approved not because someone has verified them against the contract, but because no one has the bandwidth to. Entitlements go unaudited and errors accumulate quietly.

Overpayment is one of the most common problems we see and it’s not a small one. Billing errors, unused licenses, and misaligned entitlements can quietly add up to six figures. But overpayment is often just the most visible issue. Underneath it, most firms don't know what their full exposure actually is: whether they're being billed correctly for the entitlements they've granted, whether users who left the firm are still generating fees, or whether their exchange reporting is accurate enough to survive an audit. Back fees, fines, and SEC audits are all real possibilities and yet because no one has done a thorough review, the risk stays invisible.

Invisible risk is still risk. It just doesn't announce itself until it's too late.

What a dedicated function actually provides

The answer isn't necessarily a full-time hire. For most mid-market financial firms, the scale doesn't justify dedicated internal headcount for this alone. But the function itself, the work that needs to happen, doesn't go away because no one has been formally assigned to it.

That function needs to cover a few things: contract and renewal management so nothing auto-renews without a deliberate decision; invoice reconciliation so what you're paying matches what you've contracted; entitlement and user access management so your reporting is accurate and your risk is known; and enough vendor landscape knowledge to know when you're getting a fair deal and when you're not.

When our Customer Success team works with clients, we start by understanding where they are. Beyond contracts and invoices, we want to understand the pressures their teams face and what their market data management structure looks like, if they even have one. It’s an approach I’ve brought from managing complex vendor relationships in other industries: you can’t close gaps you haven’t mapped. From there, we work alongside the people already handling market data to close the gaps: catching billing errors before they compound, flagging renewals before they auto-execute, and making sure entitlements and exchange reporting are audit-ready. That's the partnership model at the center of how we work.

Where Concertiv comes in

For firms without a dedicated market data owner, that role doesn't have to go unfilled. Concertiv steps in as an extension of your team, so your Controller isn't spending weekends reconciling invoices, your IT Director isn't fielding entitlement requests between security incidents, and your leadership isn't guessing at whether the spend is right. The people currently managing market data on the side get to focus on the work they were actually hired to do.

If you're a CFO or COO who has found yourself wondering whether your firm's market data spend is truly under control, you're not alone. In our experience, the answer is rarely as clear as it should be, and that's not an indictment of your team. It's simply what happens when a complex category doesn't have a dedicated owner. We'd welcome the chance to take a look and show you what's possible.

Reach out to our team HERE to start the conversation.

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