Best Market Data Provider (Exchange): London Stock Exchange

For LSE, the award is a fitting testament to the successful introduction of the Group Ticker Plant, which has been a significant technology investment and will see latency reduced to less than five microseconds. “It’s as low latency as it gets—leading the way in the exchange world,” says Simon Youdan, head of business development at LSE Real Time Data, LSE Group.

In addition to being at the forefront of the product offering, LSE has taken a collaborative approach, tailoring policies following conversations with market participants and involving clients in these changes. “How we’ve communicated changes [to data policies] has been well received,” says Youdan.

Going forward, the focus is on creating more bespoke and specific policies. LSE’s recent introduction of a separate policy on ‘contract for difference’ (CFD) products is an example of this. This has seen LSE isolate the use of data to trade off-book. “We’ve learnt how differently our data is being used and we’ve tailored our policies accordingly,” says Youdan, adding that the CFD policy affirms LSE’s focus on allowing users to scale licenses based on the size of their operations, making data policies fairer to consumers.

As part of designing fairer and more scalable data policies, LSE has also worked more closely with major vendors. These strong relationships have been imperative for LSE’s upcoming Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) release too. Clients can expect to see a post-trade MiFID II compliance feed from LSE, which will run parallel with the existing feed to offer the choice of taking extra content, or continuing with the existing feed to avoid making amendments on their side. The new feed will feature additional content, such as liquidity flags and thresholds. Other datasets firms need to comply with include the MiFID II regulation coming into force in January 2018. The same data could be derived from the existing feed too, but the new version is aimed at making it easier for clients to comply.