Capital markets firms are facing growing pressure to process more market data across a wider range of trading venues, asset classes and geographic regions, according to a new white paper from market-data infrastructure provider Exegy.
The report, titled “The Infrastructure Tax of Total Market Access,” argues that the ability to integrate new liquidity sources quickly is becoming increasingly important as trading becomes more fragmented. The analysis points to the expansion of equities, derivatives, digital assets, tokenised instruments and prediction markets as factors increasing the demands placed on market-data infrastructure.
The issue is not simply the amount of data being generated. Trading firms must also normalize information from different venues, maintain low-latency connections and operate across markets that increasingly trade for longer periods of the day. This is creating pressure on technology teams to expand market access without continually rebuilding core infrastructure.
Market Data Infrastructure Faces Greater Fragmentation
Market-data infrastructure provides the technology required to collect, normalize, distribute and analyze information from financial markets.
Historically, firms could build infrastructure around a relatively defined group of exchanges and asset classes. That model has become more complicated as new venues and financial instruments have emerged.
Exegy identifies four developments contributing to the growing infrastructure burden:
- Expansion across asset classes
- Increasing regional liquidity
- Longer trading hours
- Fragmentation across multiple venues and protocols
The company refers to the resulting operational burden as an “infrastructure tax.”
For trading firms, the cost can include additional connectivity, data normalization, hardware, software development, monitoring and compliance requirements.
Trading Activity Is Expanding Across Regions
The growth of regional markets is another factor increasing the complexity of global trading infrastructure.
Exegy cites rising activity across MENA, APAC and LATAM, where firms increasingly need connections to local trading venues and liquidity pools.
The report says average daily message traffic on Abu Dhabi’s market reached a peak depth of €87.4 million in March 2026. It also reports that Shanghai’s Layer 2 message volumes increased from 106.5 million per day in 2024 to 180.9 million in 2026.
Brazil’s B3 is projected to receive $85 billion in foreign capital inflows in 2026, according to the figures cited in the report, nearly three times the previous year’s level.
Higher activity does not automatically translate into greater profitability for trading firms. It does, however, increase the potential amount of market information that institutions must capture and process when seeking access to those markets.
Regional connectivity
Adding a new geographic market can require more than establishing a network connection.
Firms may need to accommodate local market-data formats, exchange protocols, trading calendars, regulatory requirements and latency characteristics. The technology challenge becomes more complex when multiple markets must be integrated into a common operating environment.
Near-Continuous Trading Changes Infrastructure Requirements
Trading hours are also becoming less uniform.
Exegy points to the development of near-continuous 24/5 trading and overnight US alternative trading systems (ATS), including Blue Ocean, Bruce and MOON, as examples of an increasingly persistent liquidity environment.
The company argues that overnight markets create additional challenges because there is not always a standardized reference price comparable to the consolidated market structures available during conventional trading hours.
Exegy reports that MOON ATS overnight notional activity increased more than 200% between late 2025 and early 2026.
The report links part of this expansion to South Korean brokerages, which it says held a record $171.8 billion in US equity positions and diversified their venue exposure following a 2024 market outage.
For market-data providers and trading firms, the extension of trading activity into overnight sessions means systems may need to operate across a broader range of liquidity conditions rather than treating overnight markets as a limited extension of the regular trading day.
Digital Assets and Prediction Markets Add New Data Sources
Traditional exchanges are no longer the only source of market information relevant to institutional trading operations.
Digital-asset markets and prediction markets have created additional data streams that some financial institutions may need to evaluate and normalize.
Exegy cites Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetuals exchange, as an example. The company estimates that the platform processed approximately $2.6 trillion in notional volume during 2025.
The report also says Polymarket recorded more than $22 billion in volume during 2025, with 2026 activity pacing toward more than $30 billion.
These markets operate differently from conventional regulated exchanges. Their data structures, trading mechanisms and settlement models can differ substantially from those used in traditional capital markets.
That creates an additional technology challenge for institutions seeking to combine conventional market data with information from decentralized or emerging venues.
Regulatory Consolidated Tapes Could Change Market Data Management
Regulatory developments are also changing the way market information is aggregated.
Exegy identifies three consolidated tape initiatives as particularly significant:
- The European Consolidated Tape for shares and ETFs, which launched in July 2026
- The UK consolidated bond and derivatives tape, which began rolling out in June 2026
- Canada’s consolidated best bid and offer initiative
Consolidated tapes are intended to bring together market information from multiple trading venues into a more unified source.
For trading firms, this can reduce some of the need to build and maintain separate connections to multiple sources for specific forms of market information.
However, consolidated data does not eliminate every infrastructure requirement. Firms with specialized strategies may still require direct feeds where latency, depth or venue-specific information is important.
Overnight market data remains fragmented
The situation is different for overnight US equity trading.
Exegy’s Overnight Best Bid and Offer (OBBO) product is positioned as a voluntary consolidated reference for this segment because there is not yet an equivalent regulatory tape for overnight US equity trading.
The distinction highlights an important difference between regulatory data aggregation and commercial market-data products. A consolidated tape established by regulation and a privately operated aggregation service can serve overlapping but different functions.
Managed Market Data Versus In-House Infrastructure
The growing complexity of market connectivity has created a strategic question for trading firms: whether to continue building infrastructure internally or increasingly rely on managed services.
Exegy’s commercial offering is directly relevant to this debate. The company markets its Axiom managed data-as-a-service platform as a way to reduce infrastructure complexity.
Exegy says recent deployments have achieved server-footprint reductions of up to 47%.
Those figures come from the vendor and therefore should be considered in that context. They do not establish that comparable reductions would apply across all capital-markets firms.
In-house infrastructure
Large trading institutions may retain substantial internal infrastructure because they require precise control over latency, data processing, security and system architecture.
Internal systems can also be tailored to specific trading strategies and operational requirements.
Managed services
Managed infrastructure can reduce the amount of hardware and engineering capacity required to connect to expanding numbers of data sources.
The trade-off is greater dependence on external providers, which can introduce considerations around vendor resilience, service-level agreements, data governance, operational concentration and control over technology.
The appropriate model can therefore vary significantly between a high-frequency trading firm, a global bank, an asset manager and a smaller institutional trading operation.
The Economics of the Infrastructure Tax
Market-data infrastructure creates costs that are not limited to licensing fees.
Firms may incur expenses related to:
- Market-data subscriptions
- Exchange connectivity
- Network infrastructure
- Servers and hardware
- FPGA or other acceleration technology
- Software engineering
- Data normalization
- Monitoring and operational support
- Compliance and audit requirements
As the number of venues increases, these costs can compound.
The issue is particularly relevant when a firm enters a new market or adds a new asset class. If every expansion requires a separate infrastructure project, the technology cost of accessing new liquidity can become a constraint on business growth.
This is the central premise of Exegy’s infrastructure-tax argument: market access becomes more expensive when technology systems cannot absorb new data sources without substantial redesign.
Risks and Limitations of Greater Infrastructure Agility
Greater flexibility can reduce some technology barriers, but it does not remove the underlying risks associated with market-data operations.
Third-party dependency
Greater use of managed infrastructure can create dependency on external technology providers. Outages or service disruptions can therefore affect multiple customers simultaneously.
Latency requirements
A managed platform may be suitable for some trading strategies but less appropriate for strategies where microsecond-level performance is a critical competitive factor.
Data quality
Aggregating more sources increases the importance of accurate normalization, timestamps, symbol mapping and data validation.
Regulatory complexity
Accessing additional markets can introduce jurisdiction-specific requirements that technology providers cannot resolve solely through data aggregation.
Integration costs
Moving from an established internal system to a managed platform can itself require significant migration and testing resources.
What the Shift Means for Capital Markets Technology
The competitive debate in market-data infrastructure is increasingly centered on how quickly firms can adapt to changes in market structure.
Exegy’s analysis reflects a broader industry movement toward managed data services, although major providers such as Refinitiv, ICE Data Services and Bloomberg already operate substantial market-data businesses.
This means infrastructure agility is becoming a competitive consideration rather than a new technology concept.
The relevant measure for firms is not simply whether they can process today’s data volumes. It is whether their architecture can accommodate new venues, asset classes and geographic markets without requiring a complete rebuild each time market structure changes.
Future Outlook for Capital Markets Infrastructure
The expansion of regional liquidity, extended trading hours, digital assets and emerging market structures is likely to keep market-data infrastructure under pressure.
Regulatory consolidated tapes may simplify access to certain categories of market information, while commercial aggregation services can address areas where standardized regulatory infrastructure does not yet exist.
At the same time, the balance between managed services and proprietary infrastructure will remain dependent on factors including trading strategy, firm size, latency requirements, operational risk and tolerance for third-party dependency.
The broader direction is toward infrastructure that can accommodate more sources without proportional increases in complexity. Whether firms achieve that through internal technology, managed platforms or a combination of both will vary across the capital markets.
Conclusion
The expansion of trading venues and asset classes is changing the technology requirements of global capital markets. Exegy’s latest report highlights how regional liquidity growth, longer trading hours, digital assets and market fragmentation can increase the operational burden associated with market-data infrastructure.
Consolidated tapes and managed data services may reduce some of that complexity, but they do not eliminate the need for specialized connectivity, data governance and low-latency infrastructure.
For capital-markets firms, the central technology issue is increasingly how efficiently they can add new sources of liquidity while maintaining performance, reliability and control over their market-data operations.
