Awards special report
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At this year's Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards dinner, guest speaker Davey Johnson─a former baseball player and manager, who was one of the early adopters of statistical analysis and long before "sabermetrics" was popularized in Michael Lewis' best-seller Moneyball─described how his teammates would ridicule his suggestions that they apply mathematical analysis to their playing. Johnson, a math major who also studied programming on early mainframe computers, said his efforts earned him the nickname "dumb-dumb" from fellow players who didn't realize what a game-changer this approach would become.
So it was only fitting that Johnson present the evening's awards, which reflect innovations like this─along with quality and service─in the world of market data rather than sports.
This year, Thomson Reuters won five awards, with Bloomberg─which won the award for best overall data vendor─and Interactive Data taking four apiece, and a host of other data providers splitting a total of 29 categories between them.
Living up to the spirit of innovation that the awards are designed to reflect, one of Interactive Data's wins was the Most Innovative Market Data Project for the vendor's Continuous Evaluated Pricing service that provides real-time evaluated prices for fixed income securities to provide a level of transparency and price discovery that has not existed until now.
Meanwhile, Bank of Montreal won the Best Reference Data Initiative category for its BMO Skyway initiative─a project implemented by Web Services data provider Xignite to deliver an on-demand platform for data sourcing and enterprise distribution.
On behalf of all those involved in the awards, we congratulate the winners and all the finalists. The competitive nature of the awards is a reflection of the amount of innovation within our industry, and it's our privilege to report on, recognize and reward that innovation-and we hope it will spur even greater efforts next year.
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More on Awards & Rankings
Best private markets data provider—MSCI
MSCI’s Private Capital Transparency standardises manager‑reported and independent private‑asset data, linking private and public markets.
Most innovative market data project/initiative—firmfact
Firmfact automates market‑data contracts, invoices and entitlements for banks and asset managers. Its AI reads documents, matches invoices line‑by‑line and verifies licences with minimal keying.
Best market data newcomer (vendor or product)—Octaura
Octaura’s Insights Platform is an integrated market intelligence and analytics offering purpose-built for the leveraged loan market.
Best market data provider (broker)—Fenics Market Data & Analytics
FMD’s Broker Data service draws on BGC Group’s global brokerage operations to provide pricing, trade and order-flow information across FX, rates, fixed income, commodities and derivatives.
Best evaluated pricing service provider/vendor—Infront
Infront Quant supplies independent, cross‑asset valuations with a “white‑box approach”, offering level 1 and 2 transparency.
IMD & IRD Awards 2026 winner’s interview—Smartstream
Smartstream wins Best reference data managed service at the IMD & IRD Awards 2026
Best reference data integration vendor—Gresham
Gresham’s AI-native EDM Suite combines data from disparate sources and systems and provides user-firms with a single point of integration across the data life cycle.
Best ESG data initiative—Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s Impact and Allocation dataset provides investors with a consistent means of assessing how proceeds are being deployed and what outcomes issuers report.
