Paolo Ciaramellano, Head of Sales, Marketing and ConsultingDrawing on more than 25 years of market data experience, the company developed its Market Data Hub (MDH) after its market data outsourcing work kept uncovering savings that clients could not capture.
“We kept finding cost-reduction opportunities, but no technology to capture them without involving IT, application owners or external consultants,” says Paolo Ciaramellano, head of sales, marketing and consulting.
When the Project Costs More than It Saves
The obstacle is rarely the savings themselves. Changing how data is sourced or distributed usually means internal IT effort, fees from the third parties that own the applications and consultancy costs. EXFIDANT offers an illustrative case: saving €1 million on a €20 million budget is significant, but if the project needed to achieve it costs €800,000, the net benefit in the first year falls to €200,000, a business case few management teams will approve.
With MDH, the same project might cost around €100,000, lifting the first-year net benefit to €900,000 and turning it into a compelling case for approval. Sitting between data vendors and consuming applications, the platform normalises content from different providers so institutions can switch vendors, consolidate onto fewer suppliers or blend sources, while applications keep receiving data in the formats they already use.
Assessment First, Software Second
Before proposing any software, EXFIDANT’s consultancy team analyses the client’s cost drivers in a neutral way and estimates the achievable savings. The client receives a stepby-step plan it can execute alone, together with a timeline for doing it with MDH: work that might take eight months internally can often be completed in about one.
We bet with the client on the success of the project: recurring fees apply only if the agreed savings are achieved.
Clients can also opt for a one-off implementation fee, with recurring module charges tied to the savings range estimated during the assessment. “We bet with the client on the success of the project: recurring fees apply only if the agreed savings are achieved,” says Ciaramellano. Otherwise, the client pays only the one-off fee.
The Levers behind the Savings
MDH modules address the main cost drivers. Intelligent sourcing routes each request to cached data, fixed-cost bulk files or on-demand vendor calls, removing duplicate requests. Unmapped or unauthorised requests are held before they can trigger a fee, preventing unexpected spikes on the vendor invoice. Usage analytics break down consumption by application, desk and vendor; cost attribution allocates spend across the business; and what-if forecasting estimates the impact of new feeds or vendor mixes before commitments are made.
Targeting the Largest Line Item
Terminals often account for 40 per cent or more of an institution’s market data spend, making them central to EXFIDANT’s cost optimisation approach. Where a terminal is used mainly to obtain data, MDH can deliver the same vendor content to applications as a feed, allowing the seat to be cancelled.
The latest addition to that approach is MDH Terminal Tracer, first showcased at the SIPUG 2026 event in Zurich. It combines terminal usage with subscription costs and entitlements across Bloomberg, FactSet and LSEG, and compares activity with each user’s role to identify seats suitable for sharing, rotation or removal. Its monitoring agent tracks terminal processes and window states without recording keystrokes or capturing screen content.
Savings Management Can Approve
By pairing independent assessment with technology that avoids costly change programmes, EXFIDANT gives institutions a route to lower market data costs that management can approve.
The Levers behind the Savings
MDH modules address the main cost drivers. Intelligent sourcing routes each request to cached data, fixed-cost bulk files or on-demand vendor calls, removing duplicate requests. Unmapped or unauthorised requests are held before they can trigger a fee, preventing unexpected spikes on the vendor invoice. Usage analytics break down consumption by application, desk and vendor; cost attribution allocates spend across the business; and what-if forecasting estimates the impact of new feeds or vendor mixes before commitments are made.
Targeting the Largest Line Item
Terminals often account for 40 per cent or more of an institution’s market data spend, making them central to EXFIDANT’s cost optimisation approach. Where a terminal is used mainly to obtain data, MDH can deliver the same vendor content to applications as a feed, allowing the seat to be cancelled.
The latest addition to that approach is MDH Terminal Tracer, first showcased at the SIPUG 2026 event in Zurich. It combines terminal usage with subscription costs and entitlements across Bloomberg, FactSet and LSEG, and compares activity with each user’s role to identify seats suitable for sharing, rotation or removal. Its monitoring agent tracks terminal processes and window states without recording keystrokes or capturing screen content.
Savings Management Can Approve
By pairing independent assessment with technology that avoids costly change programmes, EXFIDANT gives institutions a route to lower market data costs that management can approve.
Choosing Data Cost Optimisation Software Without Disrupting Existing Systems
A financial institution may identify substantial savings in its market data contracts only to discover that implementing those changes requires expensive modifications to existing applications. Vendor feeds support established workflows across trading and portfolio management, making even straightforward subscription changes difficult to execute. Software intended to reduce market data expenditure must address both the cost of information and the expense of changing how it reaches users. Procurement executives need to establish whether projected savings remain worthwhile after implementation costs are included.
Market data spending can become difficult to control when departments independently acquire overlapping information. Multiple suppliers may provide similar reference data or pricing content, while individual teams retain subscriptions established around historical requirements. Reducing this duplication requires visibility into what information is purchased and where it is consumed. Buyers should examine whether software can identify overlapping content across vendors and support consolidation without compromising the information required by different departments. Terminal subscriptions deserve particular attention when expensive access arrangements remain assigned to employees whose daily responsibilities no longer justify them.
Existing application dependencies complicate supplier consolidation. Financial institutions often operate systems developed around specific data formats and delivery arrangements. Replacing a feed may require changes to application interfaces or involvement from external software providers. These additional expenses can absorb much of the anticipated reduction in licensing fees. A data management platform capable of normalising incoming content and maintaining established delivery formats can reduce the work associated with changing suppliers. Implementation proposals should account for internal resource commitments rather than presenting subscription savings separately from project costs.
Data reuse introduces another requirement when departments apply different valuation rules. Risk teams may require prices captured at particular times, while settlement processes depend on end-of-day figures. A shared information repository should accommodate these differences without forcing every department into identical validation procedures. Buyers should examine how pricing rules are configured and whether the system can preserve distinct datasets for separate business purposes. Such flexibility can limit duplicate purchases while maintaining the calculations required by existing applications.
Cost reduction also requires a credible starting assessment. Institutions may recognise excessive spending without knowing which contracts offer achievable savings. Software procurement based on a broad reduction target can leave implementation teams confronting technical constraints after the purchase. A preliminary review of vendor contracts and consumption patterns helps establish realistic priorities. Executives should require a clear account of the work involved and how savings will be verified before committing recurring expenditure.
EXFIDANT develops Market Data Hub (MDH), a modular platform that helps financial institutions control market data expenditure while limiting changes to existing systems. EXFIDANT's MDH normalises information from different market data suppliers, allowing financial institutions to change data sources without requiring substantial modifications to existing applications. Its PX Validation module supports different pricing rules using shared data, while terminal usage analysis helps identify potentially unnecessary subscriptions. EXFIDANT begins engagements by assessing cost drivers and identifying achievable reductions before recommending software modules or implementation work. This approach connects purchasing decisions to measurable savings while accounting for technical constraints. Banks and asset managers managing overlapping vendor contracts or expensive data terminals are particularly relevant buyers.
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