# Who owns the market data industry

The visible brands are terminals. The durable positions sit underneath — exchange data rights, identifiers, index licensing, ratings — mapped from filings.

*https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/who-owns-market-data · background to Stock Market Data APIs*

**Answer:** The financial data industry is concentrated, but not where the brands are. Terminals and feeds compete; the durable positions sit underneath them, in exchange data rights, security identifiers, index licensing and credit ratings. Eight public companies reported about 41.6 billion dollars of data, index and ratings revenue for 2025. Bloomberg is private and reports nothing, which is why every published market-share figure here is an estimate.

## How it works

A price on a screen has passed through five layers, each owned by a different kind of company.

**The venue** generates data as a by-product of matching orders and sells it twice: as a
proprietary direct feed, and into the consolidated tape its regulator requires. **The vendor** — a
terminal, a feed handler, an API — licenses from many venues, normalises, and resells with a
workflow around it. **The identifier layer** decides whether two firms agree that this instrument
is that instrument. **The index layer** turns prices into a benchmark and licenses it to funds,
which pay on assets rather than usage. **The ratings layer** sells an opinion regulation makes
expensive to ignore.

Money moves up the chain: the fund pays the index provider, the bank pays the vendor, the vendor
pays the venue, and nearly everyone pays for identifiers whether or not they see the line item.
Defensibility moves the other way. The layer a competitor can rebuild in a year is the terminal;
the layers nobody can rebuild are the ones whose whole value is that everybody already agreed on
them.

## The Reuters correction

Most writing on this subject gets one name wrong, so here is the chain in order.

Thomson Reuters sold a 55 per cent interest in its Financial & Risk business to a Blackstone-led
consortium, with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and GIC alongside; the sale
[closed on 1 October 2018](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2018/october/thomson-reuters-and-blackstone-close-financial-and-risk-transaction)
for roughly 17 billion dollars gross, and the business was renamed Refinitiv. LSEG's
2025 annual report records the next step in its glossary: Refinitiv "was founded in 2018" and
"became a subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group as of 29 January 2021".

Reuters News did not go with it. Thomson Reuters' 2025 annual report states that Reuters supplies
news and information services to "the Data & Analytics business of LSEG" **through 1 October
2048**, and recorded 398 million dollars under that agreement in 2025 — "the current minimum
annual value", adjusted for inflation and currency. Against Reuters segment revenue of 853 million
dollars, LSEG is close to half the news agency's business.

So Reuters is a news agency with one very large customer, and Refinitiv is a retired brand inside
LSEG. Anything headed "Bloomberg versus Reuters" is describing 2017.

## The map, and what counts as market share

The share figures that circulate come from Burton-Taylor International Consulting, a paid research
product; what is open is second-hand paraphrase, so nothing below is taken from there. The
alternative is to build the comparison from what the companies file themselves.

The denominator is the revenue eight reporting companies attributed, in their own 2025 segment
disclosures, to financial data, index and ratings businesses; trading, clearing, listings,
mortgage technology and automotive data are excluded. LSEG is converted from sterling at the 2025
average of 1.3192 dollars per pound (Federal Reserve G.5A). FactSet's year ends 31 August, the
rest 31 December.

| Company | Segments counted | 2025 revenue, US$m | Share |
| --- | --- | ---: | ---: |
| S&P Global | Market Intelligence, Ratings, Energy, Indices | 13,589 | 32.7% |
| Moody's | Investors Service, Analytics | 7,718 | 18.6% |
| LSEG | Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell, Risk Intelligence | 7,270 | 17.5% |
| ICE | Fixed Income and Data Services; exchange data and connectivity | 3,450 | 8.3% |
| MSCI | whole company | 3,134 | 7.5% |
| Morningstar | whole company | 2,446 | 5.9% |
| FactSet | whole company (FY to 31 Aug 2025) | 2,322 | 5.6% |
| Nasdaq | Index; Data & Listing Services | 1,631 | 3.9% |

Roughly 41.6 billion dollars, with the top three at 68.8 per cent of it. Every figure comes from
the filing cited below; the arithmetic is the only part that is ours.

Each is defended in a different layer. S&P Global sells research, commodity price assessments,
indices and ratings — the last two are the position. Moody's sells ratings and risk analytics; the
ratings half is defended. LSEG sells terminals, feeds and FTSE Russell benchmarks, and only the
benchmarks are hard to displace. ICE's data position is fixed income evaluated pricing, where
there is no exchange print to compete with. MSCI is almost entirely index licensing, and Nasdaq's
smaller index business sits in the same layer. FactSet sells a workstation and feeds, with CUSIP
underneath. Morningstar sells fund data, PitchBook and, through Morningstar DBRS, ratings.

**Bloomberg is not in the table, and that is the point.** Bloomberg L.P. is privately held, files
no annual report and publishes no revenue. Adding a third-party estimate to a column of audited
segment numbers would make the whole column an estimate — which is why every published
market-share figure here is one. Two others sit outside for the same reason: SIX Group, owned by
its member banks, whose Financial Information unit reported net operating income of 408.2 million
Swiss francs for 2025 within a group total of 1,496.5 million; and Infront, the European terminal
challenger, privately held since it left the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2021.

One layer does have a share published by a regulator. The SEC's NRSRO statistics show 2,192,543
outstanding credit ratings across ten registered agencies at 31 December 2025: S&P holds 1,077,798
(49.2 per cent), Moody's 684,055 (31.2 per cent) and Fitch 274,291 (12.5 per cent) — 92.9 per cent
between three firms, counted rather than estimated. It exists because registration under Section
15E makes the count public record.

## What it costs

By layer, with the price-setter named. Margin measures differ — operating margin for some,
adjusted EBITDA for others — because that is how each reports.

**Exchange data.** The venue sets the price and files it with its regulator — in the US under
Regulation NMS, where the SEC may suspend or disapprove it. ICE reported 1,031 million dollars of
data and connectivity revenue inside its Exchanges segment for 2025; Nasdaq, 804 million of Data &
Listing Services revenue. A challenger cannot replicate this: the data is a by-product of order
flow, and the order flow is the business.

**Vendor subscriptions.** The vendor sets the price but pays the layers below it. LSEG's Data &
Analytics division took 3,978 million pounds in 2025 at a 40.7 per cent adjusted EBITDA margin,
after 821 million of cost of sales for "purchased content and royalties, including news,
specialist data and exchange data". S&P Global's Market Intelligence, the largest single data
business in the table, returned a 20.2 per cent operating margin; FactSet's whole-company figure
was 32.2 per cent. This is the competitive layer, and its margins say so.

**Index licensing.** The provider charges funds on assets under management, so revenue compounds
with markets rather than headcount. MSCI's Index segment: 1,786.8 million dollars at a **76.4 per
cent** adjusted EBITDA margin. FTSE Russell: 954 million pounds at 66.6 per cent. S&P Global's
Indices segment: 1,839 million dollars at a 69.1 per cent operating margin. A challenger would
have to persuade asset owners to rewrite mandates naming a specific benchmark — a governance
process, not a sale.

**Ratings.** The agency sets the price and the issuer pays, because investor mandates and capital
rules are written around the output. S&P Global's Ratings segment: 4,549 million dollars at a 66.2
per cent operating margin. Moody's Investors Service: 4,317 million of segment revenue and 2,746
million of adjusted operating income, 63.6 per cent. Replicating that needs NRSRO registration and
then decades of accepted track record.

**Identifiers.** FactSet's 10-K describes CUSIP Global Services as "the exclusive issuer of CUSIP
and CINS identifiers globally" and the official ISIN numbering agency for the US. FactSet paid S&P
Global 1.925 billion dollars for it in 2022 — for a numbering scheme. The margin is not the useful
figure here; the price paid is.

## What the concentration is made of

**Switching costs across a desk.** Replacing a vendor means reconciling every downstream report,
model and compliance artefact built on its conventions. The cost is not the licence; it is the
year of parallel running.

**Ticker and definition consistency.** Two firms confirming a trade must agree on the instrument,
its corporate action history and the adjustment convention. Buying from the same vendor as your
counterparties is a way of buying agreement, which is why the reference data layer holds when the
front end changes.

**The messaging network.** The most cited reason a Bloomberg Terminal survives a budget review has
nothing to do with data: the buy side is contractually reachable on it, and network effects are
not priced out of existence by a cheaper feed. See
[what to use instead of a Bloomberg Terminal](https://stockmarketstack.com/alternatives/bloomberg-terminal).

**Regulatory entrenchment.** Ratings carry the NRSRO designation, an SEC registration created by
the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of 2006 that determines which opinions certain rules accept.
Exchange data rights run through Regulation NMS: venues supply core data to the consolidated tape,
file their fees, and sell richer proprietary feeds alongside.

**Index and identifier licensing.** Both license a vocabulary rather than a file — permission to
use a name other people already recognise, which is why a cheaper substitute does not
substitute.

## What is moving

**A European consolidated tape, being built now.** Under the MiFIR review, ESMA selected Ediphy
(fairCT) as the first consolidated tape provider for bonds on 3 July 2025 and
[authorised EuroCTP for shares and ETFs](https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-authorises-euroctp-consolidated-tape-provider-shares-and-exchange-traded)
on 27 July 2026, with a transition to 30 September 2026 before the service starts and a five-year
term; a third selection, for OTC derivatives, has followed. It is the first structural change to
European market data economics in a decade, and it is not yet running.

**The US rule is upheld and still phasing in.** The SEC adopted the Market Data Infrastructure
Rule in December 2020 (Release 34-90610), adding competing consolidators and self-aggregators
alongside a broader definition of core data. Exchanges challenged it and lost — the D.C. Circuit
[denied the petitions](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01100/pdf/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01100-0.pdf)
in Nasdaq Stock Market LLC v. SEC on 24 May 2022 — but a second case that summer
[vacated the SEC's CT Plan Order](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01167/pdf/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01167-0.pdf)
on 5 July 2022, striking the single-plan governance reform while leaving the rule standing.
Implementation moved into the 2024 Regulation NMS amendments, challenged in turn and upheld on
14 October 2025; the SEC's
[order of 31 October 2025](https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/exorders/2025/34-104172.pdf) then
pushed compliance for the amended pricing increment and access fee caps to November 2026. That
order still describes consolidated information as disseminated "through an exclusive securities
information processor".

**Open identifiers exist and are unevenly adopted.** The Legal Entity Identifier is free to look
up and issued through GLEIF's accredited issuers; the active population passed 2.93 million at the
end of 2025. It is also the case against assuming open beats incumbent on merit: the
[same report](https://www.gleif.org/lei-data/global-lei-index/download-global-lei-system-business-reports/download-global-lei-system-business-report-q4-2025/q4-2025-quarterly_business_report.pdf)
puts the renewal rate at 56.7 per cent and good standing at 61.7 per cent. FIGI, the
instrument-level open standard maintained by the Object Management Group, is free to use and still
does not appear on the confirmations that matter. [Which identifier to build
on](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/cusip-isin-figi-identifiers) works through what each one costs.

**LLM interfaces erode the terminal, not the licence.** What a model answering in natural language
competes with is the user interface — screens, shortcuts, function codes — the one layer a
competitor could always rebuild. The layers underneath are untouched, and the incumbents are
already writing the contracts that say so: LSEG's 2025 annual report describes launching "MCP
infrastructure" under its LSEG Everywhere strategy, and states that its AI-ready content "will
also be accessible to licensed ChatGPT and Claude users via MCP". The load-bearing word there is
*licensed*. The chat window is new; the entitlement check behind it is the one that was behind the
terminal.

## What you can do about it

**Layers you will pay for either way.** Real-time exchange data, if you need it live and
attributable: the fee is set by the venue and passed through by whoever you buy from, so shopping
vendors changes the markup, not the base — and the venue's schedule is public, which is what
[why real-time stock data is so expensive](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/real-time-market-data-fees) reads. Index data,
if your workflow names a benchmark, where [historical
membership](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/historical-index-constituents) is the expensive half. Ratings, if you are in
credit.

**Layers you can route around.** Delayed and end-of-day prices carry a fraction of the licensing
weight, and [a surprising amount is published free by regulators and central
banks](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/free-financial-data-sources) — [Tiingo](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tiingo) sells equity history back to
1962 for tens of dollars a month, and the rest of
[market data APIs](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/market-data-apis) is priced in the same range.
Fundamentals and filings come from issuer disclosure rather than a venue, and analytics you can
compute from prices you already licensed. So can the terminal interface:
[Koyfin](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/koyfin) and the rest of
[fundamentals and research](https://stockmarketstack.com/categories/fundamentals-research) exist because the screens were
always the replaceable layer.

**Ask any cheap vendor which layer its price comes out of.** Several publish the answer already,
and [where research terminals get their data](https://stockmarketstack.com/guides/where-research-terminals-get-their-data)
collects what they say. A provider redistributing exchange
data under its own licence — [Databento](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/databento) is explicit about it, billing
historical usage by the gigabyte — has a cost base that scales with what it pays the venues, and
pricing that is durable because it is real. A provider whose price implies it pays nobody is
either serving data whose licence does not cover your use, or one enforcement letter from
repricing. That is the durability question in a cheap tool, and it is not a question about
quality.

**Design for the switch, and know where you have no leverage.** The vendor layer is competitive
precisely because its customers can leave: put an abstraction between your code and your provider
so that leaving is a configuration change — [OpenBB](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openbb) does this across roughly
thirty providers — and you are buying from the one layer where being a small customer still works.
But if what you need is the same number, at the same instant, as the counterparty you are
confirming with, you are buying agreement rather than data, and agreement is sold by whoever
everyone else already bought it from.

## Tools this bears on

- [Databento](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/databento.md) — Full order book and tick history from exchange feeds, billed by the gigabyte.
- [Tiingo](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/tiingo.md) — End-of-day equity history back to 1962, plus crypto, forex and news, from $30 a month.
- [OpenBB](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/openbb.md) — One Python API, REST app and MCP server over thirty other people's data feeds.
- [Koyfin](https://stockmarketstack.com/tools/koyfin.md) — A browser research terminal for global equities, funds, macro and estimates.

## FAQ

### Who is the largest market data company?

Nobody can answer that from public documents, because Bloomberg L.P. is privately held and publishes no revenue figure. Among companies that do report, S&P Global is the largest by data, index and ratings segment revenue — 13.6 billion dollars across four segments in 2025 — followed by Moody's at 7.7 billion and LSEG at about 7.3 billion.

### Is Reuters a market data company?

No. Thomson Reuters sold control of its Financial & Risk business in 2018; it was renamed Refinitiv and acquired by LSEG in 2021. Reuters is a news agency, and its largest single customer is LSEG, which paid it 398 million dollars in 2025 under an agreement running to October 2048.

### Which layer of the industry is the most profitable?

Index licensing and credit ratings, by a wide margin. MSCI's Index segment reported a 76.4 per cent adjusted EBITDA margin for 2025 and LSEG's FTSE Russell 66.6 per cent, against 40.7 per cent for LSEG's much larger Data and Analytics division. S&P Global's Ratings segment reported a 66.2 per cent operating margin.

### Can a startup compete with these companies?

On the terminal and the API, yes, and several in this catalogue do. On the layers underneath, no — not because of pricing but because the value of an identifier, a benchmark or a messaging network is that everyone already uses it. A new identifier that nobody else recognises solves nothing.

## Sources

1. [Annual Report 2025](https://www.lseg.com/content/dam/lseg/en_us/documents/investor-relations/annual-reports/lseg-annual-report-2025.pdf) — London Stock Exchange Group plc, 2026-02-25
2. [Preliminary results for the year ended 31 December 2025](https://www.lseg.com/content/dam/lseg/en_us/documents/investor-relations/financial-results/preliminary-results/rns/lseg-2025-preliminary-results-rns-26feb2026.pdf) — London Stock Exchange Group plc, 2026-02-26
3. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/64040/000006404026000013/spgi-20251231.htm) — S&P Global Inc., 2026-02-11
4. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1059556/000162828026009136/mco-20251231.htm) — Moody's Corporation, 2026-02-18
5. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1408198/000140819826000011/msci-20251231.htm) — MSCI Inc., 2026-02-06
6. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1013237/000162828025045769/fds-20250831.htm) — FactSet Research Systems Inc., 2025-10-22
7. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1571949/000157194926000004/ice-20251231.htm) — Intercontinental Exchange, Inc., 2026-02-05
8. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1120193/000162828026007703/ndaq-20251231.htm) — Nasdaq, Inc., 2026-02-12
9. [Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289419/000128941926000013/morn-20251231.htm) — Morningstar, Inc., 2026-02-13
10. [2025 Annual Report (Exhibit 99.1 to Form 40-F)](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1075124/000119312526094222/tri-ex99_1.htm) — Thomson Reuters Corporation, 2026-03-05
11. [NRSRO statistics, outstanding credit ratings 2014-2025](https://www.sec.gov/files/sec-stats-nrsros-20260630.xlsx) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2026-06-30
12. [Order Granting Temporary Exemptive Relief from Rules 600(b)(89)(i)(F), 610(c), 610(d) and 612 of Regulation NMS (Release No. 34-104172)](https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/exorders/2025/34-104172.pdf) — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2025-10-31
13. [ESMA authorises EuroCTP as the Consolidated Tape Provider for shares and exchange-traded funds](https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-authorises-euroctp-consolidated-tape-provider-shares-and-exchange-traded) — European Securities and Markets Authority, 2026-07-27
14. [ESMA selects Ediphy (fairCT) to become the first Consolidated Tape Provider for bonds](https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-selects-ediphy-fairct-become-first-consolidated-tape-provider-bonds) — European Securities and Markets Authority, 2025-07-03
15. [Global LEI System Business Report Q4 2025](https://www.gleif.org/lei-data/global-lei-index/download-global-lei-system-business-reports/download-global-lei-system-business-report-q4-2025/q4-2025-quarterly_business_report.pdf) — Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, 2026-01-20
16. [SIX reports strong operating results for 2025](https://www.six-group.com/en/newsroom/media-releases/2026/20260324-six-annual-results-2025.html) — SIX Group AG, 2026-03-24
17. [Foreign Exchange Rates - G.5A - Annual](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g5a/current/) — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2026-01-05
18. [Thomson Reuters and Blackstone close Financial & Risk transaction](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2018/october/thomson-reuters-and-blackstone-close-financial-and-risk-transaction) — Thomson Reuters Corporation, 2018-10-01. The announcement of a transaction that closed that day. What became of the business is in the 2025 filings above.
19. [The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC v. SEC, No. 21-1100 (D.C. Cir.)](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01100/pdf/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01100-0.pdf) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (via GPO govinfo), 2022-05-24. A decided opinion. A later case can distinguish or overrule it; nothing restates it, and this one has not been disturbed.
20. [The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC v. SEC, No. 21-1167 (D.C. Cir.)](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01167/pdf/USCOURTS-caDC-21-01167-0.pdf) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (via GPO govinfo), 2022-07-05. A decided opinion, and the vacatur it ordered still stands — the CT Plan Order has not been reinstated since.

*Last updated 2026-09-14. A reference page, corrected in place — not a dated post.*