2026 is shaping up to be a big year for tech and infrastructure modernisation. AI is everywhere right now, from boardroom conversations to market data conferences, and a recent S&P Global report found that 80% of financial firms plan to adopt AI. Many expect it to reshape how market data is delivered and consumed over the next three years. But here’s the catch. AI isn’t a switch you can just “switch on” for it to work well. It needs to sit on top of strong data foundations and a capable infrastructure.

86% of global financial firms reportedly don’t feel confident in their readiness. That contradiction is hard to ignore, and it is largely attributed to technical debt built up over years of TCO-first decision-making. Recent outages and system failures have made this painfully visible, even as operational resilience rules like the EU’s DORA and the FCA requirements came into effect last year.

So, what’s getting in the way? In many firms, the biggest blocker to effective AI deployment sits in an unglamorous but critical place: legacy market data systems. They weren’t designed for AI, and they’re exactly where operational fragility likes to hide:

1. Middleware systems with limited observability.
2. Manual, often decentralised, entitlement and permissioning processes.
3. Brittle integrations across vendors and internal consumers.
4. Siloed tooling for inventory, billing, usage, and compliance.

Once resilience becomes auditable, “manual and opaque” stops being a minor inconvenience and becomes a compounding risk. That’s why market data operations can’t keep running on “tribal knowledge + spreadsheets.” Governance expectations are rising, market structure is evolving, and initiatives like ESMA’s consolidated tape are nudging firms toward more standardised access models, new distribution patterns, and fresh commercial questions.

I won’t delve into commercial management; we covered much of that last year. Still, it’s worth saying plainly. The systems that underpin entitlements and licensing are modernising for a reason: to reduce end-user overhead, increase transparency of usage, and unlock measurable market data savings. The bigger point is this. If a firm delays modernising market data management to protect short-term TCO, the medium to long-term costs and resilience risks don’t disappear; they accumulate. Eventually, it festers into regulatory exposure, business disruption, or both.

When Modernisation Stops Being Optional

Market data is too expensive, too regulated, and too operationally intertwined to be run on legacy assumptions for much longer. In plain terms, “legacy assumptions” refer to the outdated rules that your market data stack was built around, which were once effective but now quietly drive cost, risk, and friction. Think: assuming uptime equals resilience, relying on a few key people and runbooks as the control plane, treating manual and decentralised entitlements as “good enough,” and stitching vendors and internal consumers together with brittle point-to-point integrations.

The outcome is usually familiar: shallow visibility when things degrade, governance that depends on heroics, and tooling split across inventory, usage, billing, and compliance, so nobody has a single, trusted view. Security can end up feeling implicit once you’re “inside,” scaling becomes “buy bigger boxes,” and change turns into a high-risk event. Once resilience and controls are auditable, those habits stop being quirks and start showing up as real, measurable exposure.

In 2026, modernisation is fundamentally about control over costs, compliance, resilience, and change. If your firm is considering a market data project this year, whether it’s platform migration, cloud enablement, workflow automation, governance uplift, or commercial transformation, the advice is simple. Treat it as an operating model upgrade with a clear ROI story, not an IT refresh.

We’ve seen it with clients: modernising well doesn’t just reduce pain. It turns market data into a competitive capability, freeing up time and budget that would otherwise be spent on incidents, outages, and remediation.

Market Data “Modernisation” Means Five Things

At CJC, our global team of engineers designs, builds, and operates market data systems as a 24/7 managed service for over four hundred global financial firms. We also provide advisory and support on a retainer as a market data “insurance policy” for firms with in-house market data teams to improve resilience. From that vantage point, one thing is clear: modernising doesn’t simply mean “swap vendors” or “put a cloud sticker on the same architecture.” It means building an operating model that’s business-aligned and designed to be:

1. Observable, not just available – If you can’t see latency, drop rates, entitlement failures, vendor feed health, and downstream impact in real time, you have hope, not control. Modern market data environments treat observability as a first-class feature. It is also a prerequisite for credible operational resilience discussions with senior stakeholders.
2. Automated across the lifecycle – Modern systems reduce manual touchpoints from onboarding through entitlement, compliance, billing, and offboarding. That minimises errors and improves speed and consistency, which is why workflow automation sits at the centre of market data management. We’ve recently explored how end-to-end workflow automation can reduce manual risk, shorten the lifecycle with API-driven processes and cloud-based systems, and reduce overhead.
3. Governed by design, not heroic effort – A lot of market data teams can “make it work,” but often only with constant effort, experience, and manual intervention. Modern governance means clear ownership, auditable controls, consistent data models, and repeatable processes that survive organisational change. Our work on governance and oversight shows what this looks like when modern technology and commercial thinking reinforce each other.
4. Cloud-ready in the right places – Cloud solutions aren’t usually the right answer for ultra-low-latency workflows. But for non-latency-dependent workloads, like historical data, reference data, or AI enablement, its usefulness is hard to argue with. Our CJC Lab testing has seen cloud platforms run “efficiently right up to the edge, even at 99% server utilisation”, and we’re seeing firms increasingly use cloud for:

• Elasticity for compute-heavy analytics.
• Modern entitlement controls.
• Resilience patterns, including multi-region, automation, and immutable infrastructure.
• Faster integration across internal consumers.

5. Designed for ROI, not just TCO – With tighter resilience regulation, a modern market data strategy must answer a simple question. What are we enabling? Faster product delivery, safer compliance, cheaper operations, better user experience, or fewer incidents. That’s why we encourage firms to shift the market data infrastructure discussion from total cost of ownership (TCO) to return on investment (ROI), with proven outcomes like reducing incident volumes and operational drag.

How CJC Can Help You Adopt AI:

Peter Williams often tells me that we “design, build, and operate market data systems.” What he usually skips past is that we do it globally for over four-hundred financial firms, 24/7. We also provide advisory and continuity support on a retainer for firms with in-house teams that want independent expertise and improved resilience posture.

In practice, that means specialised teams with a cross-industry perspective on best practice across market data feeds, entitlement controls, distribution layers, monitoring, workflows, and the commercial processes that keep trading floors and downstream consumers running. If there’s one message we’re hearing consistently going into 2026, it’s this. Market data modernisation has shifted from “nice-to-have” to “business-critical.”

Not because market data suddenly became important. It has always been mission-critical. The shift is due to a change in the operating context. Resilience expectations are higher, vendor scrutiny is sharper, workflows are becoming end-to-end auditable, and the economics of market data are forcing firms to prove value rather than simply absorb cost.