Market Data Costs Are Soaring—How Can Firms Take Control?

The Growing Burden of Market Data

Market data is the lifeblood of trading. Every price tick, every depth-of-book update, every corporate action fuels the strategies that drive capital markets. But this lifeblood has become one of the largest and fastest-growing cost centers for banks, hedge funds, and asset managers.

Industry surveys estimate that global financial firms spend billions of dollars annually on market data and related services, with costs rising 8–10% year over year. In many cases, market data now outpaces technology infrastructure itself as the largest single vendor expense.

The problem is not just the high cost — it is the complexity and inefficiency with which data is sourced, consumed, and governed.

The Multifaceted Challenges

1. Licensing ComplexityExchanges and vendors impose strict entitlement rules. Some licenses are priced per user, per display, or per application. Others restrict redistribution or mandate reporting at the individual user level. Failure to comply risks audits, fines, or loss of access.
2. Vendor FragmentationNo single vendor covers all markets. Firms often subscribe to multiple sources — Bloomberg, Refinitiv, ICE, CME, regional exchanges — leading to duplicate feeds and overlapping coverage. Each vendor brings its own symbology, entitlements, and APIs.
3. Redundant ConsumptionWithin large institutions, different desks or business units often subscribe to the same feeds independently. Without a centralized distribution layer, costs multiply unnecessarily.
4. Escalating Data VolumesAs trading strategies demand more depth (Level 2, Level 3 data) and broader coverage (emerging markets, alternative datasets), firms are consuming exponentially more data. Every new venue, every additional symbol, adds cost.
5. Compliance and Audit RiskExchanges routinely audit usage to ensure firms only consume what they pay for. Without robust entitlement controls, firms risk non-compliance — and expensive retroactive fees.

What a Modern Solution Must Deliver

To regain control of market data costs, firms need infrastructure that addresses both the financial and technical challenges:

1. Centralized Entitlement Management
   • – Fine-grained user and application-level controls.
   • – Integration with identity systems for automated provisioning and de-provisioning.
2. Feed Consolidation and Normalization
   • – Ingest data from multiple vendors and normalize into a single schema.
   • – Reduce duplication and simplify downstream consumption.
3. Usage Transparency and Analytics
   • – Dashboards showing which users, desks, or applications consume what data.
   • – Insights to optimize subscriptions and reduce unused licenses.li>
4. High-Performance Distribution
   • – Efficient delivery of normalized data to thousands of end-users and applications.
   • – Scalable to millions of messages per second without degradation.
5. Compliance-Ready Controls
   • – Audit trails of entitlements and usage.
   • – Configurable to reflect specific exchange/vendor licensing rules.– Configurable to reflect specific exchange/vendor licensing rules.

How 3forge Helps Firms Take Control

3forge provides a platform that not only reduces the technical complexity of managing market data but also enables firms to align costs with actual business needs.

• Entitlements Framework:3forge’s extensible entitlements system allows firms to enforce vendor licensing rules strictly at the user and application level, ensuring compliance while minimizing excess consumption.
• Data Virtualization Layer: By normalizing disparate feeds into a single logical layer, 3forge eliminates redundant subscriptions and reduces engineering overhead.
• Intelligent Distribution: With advanced replication and flexible database clustering and distribution abilities, 3forge simplifies data distribution and related scaling techniques inclusive of sharding.
• Real-Time Usage Analytics: Interactive dashboards show who is consuming which feeds in real time, enabling firms to make informed decisions about which subscriptions are truly needed.
• Extreme Performance: With the ability to process over 1 million messages per second, 3forge ensures efficient distribution across the enterprise without bottlenecks.
• Auditability and Governance: Full audit trails and role-based entitlements make responding to exchange audits faster, cheaper, and less disruptive.

Conclusion

Market data will always be essential — but it doesn’t have to be uncontrollable. The combination of licensing complexity, vendor sprawl, and redundant consumption has made data one of the most expensive parts of running a trading business.

3forge empowers firms to take back control: consolidating feeds, enforcing entitlements, providing transparency into usage, and distributing data at scale.

The result is not only reduced cost, but also stronger compliance, simpler operations, and the ability to expand coverage without runaway expense. In an era of soaring data costs, that control is a competitive advantage in itself.