3 Ways Market Data-as-a-Service Can Protect Your Business
Yesterday’s Infrastructure is Today’s Financial Loss
With rising message rates, increasing data complexity, and more frequent exchange-driven change, traditional market data infrastructure systems are being pushed to their limits. Market data-as-a-Service offers an alternative approach. By shifting infrastructure management, scaling, and ongoing maintenance to a specialized provider, firms can reduce operational risk, improve resilience, and avoid the burden of constantly adapting to evolving market conditions. It also allows teams to focus more on trading strategies and innovation, rather than maintaining and scaling infrastructure.
Many firms are turning to this model not just as a primary solution, but as a way to strengthen redundancy, improve flexibility, and better handle periods of market stress.
1. Our Underlying FPGA-based technology delivers reliable, consistent, low-latency and full-depth market data,even in the most volatile conditions.
At Exegy we know your trading strategies depend on the quality and consistency of your market data infrastructure. Markets are unpredictable. The unexpected volatility brought on by the onset of COVID-19 took everyone by surprise in March of 2020, but Exegy’s infrastructure held up even when markets were at their peak.
The reliability of Exegy’s market data is trusted by regulators like FINRA, that depends on us to provide data for the Consolidated Audit Trail.
Market Data as a Service reduces the risk of dropping data and is a cost-effective solution for firms looking to protect themselves by diversifying their vendors. Mutualized access allows Market Data as a Service to provide cost-effective, best-in-class market data, that will allow your firm to stay agile while reducing your risk profile.
2. Manage Service Teams Save Maintenance Costs
Market data infrastructure requires constant maintenance—bug fixes, upgrades, and adaptation to exchange-driven changes. As the pace of change accelerates, this ongoing work becomes a significant operational burden for internal teams.
At the same time, the financial services industry is highly specialized, making it difficult and expensive to hire and retain the engineering talent required to build and maintain these systems. Managing real-time market data infrastructure often demands expertise across low-latency software, FPGA development, testing, and ongoing system optimization.
Recent analysis shows that maintaining in-house market data infrastructure can exceed $3.5 million annually, while also consuming thousands of hours of engineering time that could otherwise be spent on trading strategy development and innovation.
By shifting this responsibility to a managed services model, firms can reduce operational overhead, control costs more predictably, and free up internal resources to focus on performance and competitive differentiation.
3. Data-as-a-Service Let’s You Do More with Less
Market data-as-a-service lowers your total cost of ownership and hardware requirements. Take, for example, the changes to OPRA over the last few years.
OPRA expanded its multicast data distribution from 48 to 96 lines, fundamentally changing how options data is distributed. This shift increased peak ingestion requirements and forced firms to re-evaluate their ability to handle burst traffic, not just overall volume.
And the next major change is already on the horizon. OPRA’s upcoming dynamic symbol rebalancing will introduce more frequent and dynamic routing of data across lines, requiring firms to continuously track and adapt to changing distribution patterns.
Exegy’s market data-as-a-service offering, Axiom, uses the same underlying FPGA technology as our more latency-sensitive options. This tech allows Axiom to deliver data consistently, even during volatility spikes and ever-increasing volumes. The end result is firms spending less time and effort trying to solve issues by having infrastructure that just works.
For firms looking to reduce their exposure to risk and protect their trading strategies with reliable, consistent, enterprise-class market data managed by industry experts, Axiom is the ideal solution.
Originally posted on Trader’s Magazine as a part of Exegy’s Trading Reimagined series.
