Market Data Manager

City, London
Hydrogen Group

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant cross-functional influence. The successful candidate will be expected to lead vendor negotiations, manage licensing compliance, and deliver a multi-year improvement project, while transitioning new capabilities into business-as-usual operations.

Role Outcomes

• Lead the delivery of the Market Data Consolidation project, including vendor renegotiations, centralisation of feeds via the Enterprise Data Platform (EDP), and implementation of a Market Data Management (MDM) tool and data catalogue.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships and lead contract negotiations with the “Big 6” providers and over 100 smaller suppliers.
• Oversee the full market data budget, identifying and delivering cost savings through usage optimisation, contract consolidation, and improved governance.
• Establish a centralised market data distribution model, ensuring consistent, timely access to data across the business.
• Perform detailed feed-level analysis across vendors, comparing coverage, timeliness, granularity, and cost to identify duplication, gaps, and consolidation opportunities across pricing, reference, index, and analytics data.
• Use SQL and data analytics to interrogate market data usage, lineage, and consumption patterns within Snowflake/EDP, identifying optimisation opportunities and unused or overlapping entitlements.
• Identify synergies and rationalisation opportunities between market data feeds, platforms, and downstream consumers, driving simplification of the market data landscape.
• Implement governance frameworks for licensing, usage, and entitlements, ensuring compliance with vendor agreements and exchange policies.
• Act as the key liaison between business, technology, and compliance teams to align data services with operational and regulatory needs.
• Provide project leadership for the transformation programme, coordinating cross-functional delivery and ensuring successful transition to BAU.
• Monitor and report on market data usage, entitlements, and spend, using analytics to drive continuous improvement and cost control.

Technical Skills

• Deep knowledge of market data vendors, products, and licensing models (eg Bloomberg, Refinitiv, FactSet, FTSE, ICE, Morningstar).
• Experience managing large-scale vendor contracts and enterprise-level negotiations.
• Familiarity with market data compliance, licensing audits, and exchange rules.
• Understanding of data integration platforms and enterprise data architecture (eg Snowflake, EDP).
• Experience implementing MDM tools, data catalogues, and entitlement management systems (eg MDSL, FITS, DACS).
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret usage data and identify optimisation opportunities.
• Knowledge of financial markets and instruments, including pricing, indices, analytics, and reference data.
• Strong SQL skills with hands-on experience analysing large-scale market data sets in cloud data platforms (eg Snowflake), including usage, coverage, and cost attribution.
• Proven experience in market data feed comparison and consolidation, including identification of overlapping datasets, coverage gaps, and vendor substitution opportunities.
• Hands-on knowledge of market data consolidation programmes, including central ingestion, normalisation, entitlement mapping, and downstream distribution.
• Experience leveraging AI/advanced analytics to enhance market data governance, including automated data classification, usage pattern detection, anomaly identification, and cost optimisation insights.
• Understanding of data lineage, metadata, and data quality controls as applied to market data within enterprise data platforms.

Professional Skills

• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills across business, technology, procurement, and compliance.
• Proven leadership in delivering complex, cross-functional programmes, including project planning, risk management, and stakeholder engagement.
• Commercial mindset with a focus on cost control, value delivery, and ROI.
• Organised and process-oriented, with a focus on governance and operational excellence.
• Experience in financial services, ideally within investment or wealth management.
• Ability to operate independently while collaborating across teams to deliver strategic outcomes.