What we do · Market data
Cost is one of five questions.
The invoice only answers one.
Most market data reviews stop at the invoice. The spend is the visible symptom, but it is produced by four other things: what the contracts actually permit, whether entitlements match real use, who is allowed to decide, and whether the products bought suit the job they are doing. Paraxis works all five.
The function
Why the invoice is the last thing to look at.
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The bill is an output, not an input
Spend is set by decisions taken years earlier: a contract signed under different volumes, a tier chosen for a desk that has since moved, a feed provisioned for a system that was decommissioned. Attacking the invoice without changing those decisions moves the number once and lets it grow back.
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Nobody owns the whole picture
Procurement holds the contract, operations holds the entitlements, technology holds the feed, and compliance holds the audit response. Each can answer for their part. Very few firms have a single view that reconciles all four, which is exactly the view a vendor has.
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The products outlive the use case
Real-time where delayed would do. Depth of book nobody trades on. Coverage retained for a strategy that closed. The specification was right when it was bought and was never revisited, because no process exists to revisit it.
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Exposure accumulates quietly
Non-display use that was never declared, derived data redistributed past the licensed entity, and machine consumers reading from a terminal entitlement. None of it shows on the invoice. All of it shows in an audit.
The methodology
Five areas. Cost is one of them.
- 01
Cost
Licenses sized to what is actually consumed, redundant feeds consolidated, and renewals negotiated against benchmarked rates rather than list price.
- Forensic analysis of spend by vendor, product, and cost centre
- Provisioned entitlements compared against measured usage
- Total cost of ownership modelled, not list-price comparison
- Renewal targets set with specific commercial positions
- 02
Licensing
What the contracts actually permit, read clause by clause, against what the firm actually does with the data.
- Display, non-display, and redistribution rights mapped per agreement
- Derived data and index creation rights established
- Machine-consumer and model use read into the license, not assumed
- Assignment, affiliate, and audit clauses read together
- 03
Compliance
Entitlements reconciled to real usage, discrepancies closed before a vendor finds them, and the evidence kept current.
- Entitlement inventory at user, terminal, and application level
- Declarations tested against system behaviour
- Exposure quantified with evidence behind the number
- A standing audit-defense file rather than a fire drill
- 04
Governance
Who decides, on what cadence, recorded where. The rules that stop the run rate drifting back up once it has been brought down.
- Market data policy written to be followed and tested
- Control library mapped to vendor and regulatory obligations
- Committee charter, standing agenda, and decision rights
- Procurement calendar with notice and true-up dates
- 05
Fit for purpose
Whether the products bought suit the job they are doing. The area most reviews skip, and the one that produces structural savings rather than one-off cuts.
- Every product mapped to the use case it serves
- Over-specification surfaced: latency, depth, and coverage nobody uses
- Under-specification surfaced, including shadow purchases filling gaps
- Consolidation and substitution candidates identified with the trade-offs stated
What the work produces
One view of the function.
- One
Reconciled picture
Contract, entitlement, usage, and invoice agree, which is the view the vendor already has.
- Five
Areas, not one
Cost, licensing, compliance, governance, and fit for purpose assessed together rather than in sequence by four teams.
- Structural
Rather than one-off
Savings that come from changing the specification and the controls, not from a single round of cuts.
- Standing
Evidence
An audit-defense file that is current when a letter arrives rather than assembled after it.
Who we work with
Who carries this line.
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Heads of market data and operations
Holding the function day to day, usually without a dedicated team, and asked for a number and a plan at the same time.
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CFOs and heads of procurement
Carrying one of the largest non-compensation lines in the firm, and a renewal calendar that decides most of it.
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COOs, CDOs, and compliance
Answerable for how the function is run and for what it can evidence when a vendor, an auditor, or the board asks.
Questions we get asked
Five questions, answered before the review starts.
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How is this different from the cost-optimization work?
Cost optimization is one of the five areas and has its own page and its own methodology. This is the whole function: the contracts behind the cost, the entitlements behind the contracts, the governance that holds them, and whether the products suit their use. Firms that only want the cost work start there; firms whose spend keeps growing back usually need all five.
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What does "fit for purpose" mean in practice?
Matching each product to the job it does. Real-time where delayed would serve, depth of book nobody trades on, coverage kept for a strategy that closed, or the reverse: a gap being filled by someone expensing a second terminal. It is the least-reviewed area in most firms and often the largest source of structural saving, because it changes what is bought rather than what is paid for it.
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Do we have to do all five?
No, and the Speedway Assessment exists to tell you which ones matter for your firm. It evaluates each area and ranks them, so the scope of any follow-on work is decided by evidence rather than by where you happened to start looking.
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Will this disrupt trading or research?
Almost none of the work touches a user-facing screen. Inventory, reconciliation, and contract review are read-only. Changes to entitlements or specification are sequenced against the renewal calendar and communicated before they happen.
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Who does the work, and do you resell anything?
Senior practitioners who ran these functions inside Tier-1 buy-side and sell-side firms. Paraxis is vendor-neutral and sells no software, no data, and no reseller agreements, so the recommendation on a product is not a recommendation on our own book.