Market data cost increases slow, but prices still outmatch budgets

A new whitepaper from Substantive Research and BCG Expand finds that, after five years of tracking, the exponential growth of market data prices has begun to slow. Overall prices are still up from last year and still outpacing firms’ market data budgets, but the chasm between the two is showing signs of narrowing.

The researchers posit that the change is partly due to greater scrutiny of market data by firms’ C-suites, and to new forms of artificial intelligence that trading houses are using as bargaining chips to negotiate with vendors.

AI is inviting market data consumers and sellers to consider new questions, or new aspects to existing questions: What are consumers allowed and not allowed to do with purchased data? What value do those restrictions or allowances represent? And how much does a vendor want to participate in or control this dynamic?

“Suddenly there’s this interest in what the underlying reality is,” says Mike Carrodus, founder and CEO of Substantive Research. “If [vendors] are creating hypotheses that the consumer is going to become more powerful through AI, and there’s going to be a competitive tension that didn’t exist previously, that changes their outlook on these organizations.”

As AI has captured the attention of C-suites across financial services, it has spurred some business heads to reconsider their relationships with traditional data providers. This group is seeking alternatives among a growing crop of AI-powered data providers that use advanced forms of AI to tame multitudes of unstructured datasets, analyze market sentiment, and create synthetic data.

The new study reports that global market data revenues surpassed $50 billion for the first time in 2025, while total revenues increased by more than 40% in the past five years. Trading terminals made up 32% of total revenues in 2025, representing roughly one-third of the market. The three largest segments of the market—trading terminals, research and analytics, and pricing and reference data—together accounted for 70% of total revenues.

There are two things I’m not betting against, and that’s investment banks and Bloomberg

Mike Carrodus, Substantive Research

Substantive and BCG Expand surveyed 45 buy-side firms with a collective $25 trillion in assets under management and 25 sell-side firms with $35 trillion in assets and found that the average renewal increases for major vendors have remained elevated at rates of 14% in 2022, 18% in 2023, 15% in 2024, and 10% in 2025. Meanwhile, market data budgets have grown only modestly, by 2%-4%, in the same timeframe. However, the pair projects budgets to grow by more than 5% this year.

The slowing of price increases comes at a time marked by vocal pushback from data consumers against their providers’ pricing models. 

Most recently, members of IPUG, a UK-based industry group for users of market data, said they were considering legal action and regulatory engagement in efforts to stop the imposition of new licensing fees by exchange operator CME Group.

Last April, some Nasdaq clients publicly objected to steep fee increases imposed by the exchange on multilateral trading facilities, systematic internalizers, and dark pools. David Stevens, CEO of Aquis Exchange, a London-based MTF that buys non-display data from a range of exchanges, including Nasdaq, told WatersTechnology at the time that the price increases appeared targeted at MTFs because they share a market with the exchange giant.

And in 2024 and 2025, Substantive led a working group of market data consumers that crowdsourced the development of a negotiations framework focused on cost avoidance,  a somewhat nebulous term that compares the amount a firm is paying today for data with what they might have paid.

Apart from pushing back against providers and using AI as a bargaining chip, consumers also have an array of new tools at their disposal to aid in their battles against price increases. Usage monitoring tools have become a lucrative market, helping to give users leverage where they previously had none. 

One example, platform Crizit, was acquired by TRG Screen, a provider of market data management solutions, in October for an undisclosed sum.

“There are tools now to see duplicate data, or if there’s a certain desk that’s using three times what they should be,” says Czarina Reinante, head of market data and ESG spend analytics at Substantive. “They could have [S&P] CapIQ, Bloomberg, LSEG—everything—when they should only really be using one.”

Until recently, providers typically had more information about consumption than the consumer, a transparency issue that made negotiations difficult for clients.

More than 70% of firms that took part in the study reported that they are further capitalizing on this moment of flux by engaging their legal teams to future-proof contracts with AI-specific clauses governing dataset use, investment research, internal and external AI applications, and to add protections against AI-related cost increases. 

“It’s going from just being reactive to identifying the sorts of agreements and language we can put in place so that we can develop with confidence and not feel like there’s a massive audit risk waiting out there,” Carrodus says.

Consumers are adapting, but so are providers. With such rapid industry change, vendors are locking in longer contracts than is typical. Reinante says the standard market contract length has long been about three years, but to protect their revenues, vendors have begun offering discounted rates for five- and seven-year contracts. Anecdotally, Reinante says she has also seen more one-year contracts.

The thing about moments of flux, however, is that they can go either way. Many of the findings may be reasons to celebrate—even cautiously—for market data professionals and procurement teams, but it’s possible to end up on the wrong side of the moment. 

It’s possible that firms signing seven-year deals today will, in three years, realize they don’t need the products they’re paying for because the market has changed so dramatically. And those signing one-year contracts could risk massive price increases if today’s AI frenzy, in such a heavily regulated environment, proves to be worth less than hoped for.

“Personally, when I started this company, people asked me a lot of questions about the research market because Mifid was coming,” says Carrodus, who founded Substantive in 2015. 

At the time, some people believed that brokers would be disintermediated because technological advancements would allow buyers to pick and choose publications or use comparison tools to match themselves to analysts. “And I said, there are two things I’m not betting against, and that’s investment banks and Bloomberg. And blow me down if I didn’t get funding.”

Carrodus, though optimistic for his market data clients, is still not betting against the incumbent data providers any time soon.