Provided by Iress
As firms continue to rethink the role of market data, themes explored in Market Data as a Valuable Strategic Asset provide important context for how the conversation around data is evolving. As markets become increasingly interconnected and data-driven, firms are recognising that value lies not only in generating insights, but in how data is governed, protected, retained and made accessible across the enterprise.
This shift reflects a broader industry reality: market data is no longer just operational infrastructure supporting trading activity. As firms reassess fragmented legacy environments and disconnected ownership models, priorities are moving towards enterprise resilience, scalability and innovation to unlock greater value from strategic data assets.
Beyond fragmented data environments
Data retention and storage practices across financial markets have typically evolved incrementally over many years. Retention periods, archival processes and access controls were often shaped by the limitations of legacy infrastructure rather than deliberate enterprise-wide strategy.
The result has frequently been fragmented environments containing inconsistent governance models, duplicated storage mechanisms and limited accessibility to historical data.
Andrew Jappy, Executive General Manager APAC at Iress, explains:
“Depending on the size and type of user firm, data might only be available for a month or perhaps twelve months. If a regulator asks for data from several years ago, firms have to request that we locate and restore it, which is inefficient, time-consuming and costly.”
As trading ecosystems become more interconnected and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, these operational constraints become increasingly difficult to sustain.
Moving to modern cloud-based data environments presents an opportunity not simply to modernise infrastructure, but to rethink how data is managed, retained and operationalised across an organisation.
Legacy environments often accumulate inconsistent retention practices shaped by system constraints rather than intentional policy design. Migration to scalable cloud architectures creates the opportunity to reset this foundation — formalising governance, encryption and retention policies within a far more structured and resilient framework.
Data accessibility as a strategic capability
Accessibility should be considered a strategic capability rather than simply a technical feature.
Historically, much of the industry focus centred on storing data securely and compliantly. Increasingly, however, firms recognise that the ability to retrieve, interrogate and apply data efficiently within operational workflows is equally important.
This is particularly relevant in fragmented trading environments spanning multiple execution venues, asset classes, counterparties and liquidity sources. Firms increasingly need to access data quickly for execution analysis, compliance investigations, operational oversight and client servicing.
The value of market data increasingly lies not simply in possessing it, but in how rapidly and flexibly firms can apply it across trading, compliance and advisory workflows.
Andrew Jappy believes many firms’ expectations around accessibility are difficult to support within traditional infrastructure environments.
“Clients increasingly expect to work with their data in their own environments — combining it with other sources, applying their own analytics and extracting insights specific to their workflows. For many firms, this is more easily said than done.”
Fragmented systems, inconsistent ownership models and siloed workflows continue to constrain operational efficiency and slow decision-making. Improving outcomes therefore starts with visibility — understanding how data flows into and across the organisation, where it is transformed and how it supports front, middle and back-office workflows.
Governance, encryption and trust
Alongside accessibility, firms are placing greater emphasis on formalising governance and protection frameworks.
By unifying encryption standards, improving accessibility and formalising retention policies, organisations can move away from fragmented data management toward a more intentional and scalable operating model.
This has implications beyond compliance alone.
Robust governance and encryption frameworks strengthen confidence in data integrity and protection, while improved accessibility enables firms to derive greater strategic value from the same underlying information assets.
For firms operating in regulated financial markets, trust increasingly depends on the ability to demonstrate:
- Where data resides
- How it is protected
- How long it is retained
- Who can access it
- How quickly it can be retrieved ‘on demand’
Modern cloud-based architectures support these requirements far more effectively than fragmented legacy environments, while also enabling firms to introduce new analytics and generate valuable data insights more rapidly.
Historically, deploying new reporting or analytics tools often required lengthy implementation cycles tied to tightly coupled internal systems. More flexible cloud platforms and data lake architectures enable significantly faster development and deployment of data insight services.
For Iress, the rollout of Data Insights Lite and its archive data migration strategy reflects this broader evolution — using scalable cloud infrastructure to improve both accessibility and governance while enabling faster development of future data insight capabilities.
This creates a dual outcome: strengthening trust through robust encryption, governance and data protection while simultaneously enabling clients to extract greater value from their own data.
Operational obligation to strategic enablement
The broader industry shift is clear.
Data retention, governance and accessibility are no longer simply operational obligations sitting behind the trading desk. They are increasingly strategic enablers of agility, resilience and competitive advantage.
Modern data environments must not only safeguard information. They must also improve how firms use that information dynamically to support trading decisions, client servicing, regulatory responsiveness and operational efficiency.
The firms that succeed in increasingly data-driven markets will not necessarily be those with access to the largest datasets. They will be those best able to govern, access, protect and operationalise data as a strategic enterprise-wide asset.
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