Exegy and MarketsIO partner to modernise market data infrastructure

Two capital markets tech firms combine to offer banks a lower-risk exit from legacy market data systems.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Sat, 26 September 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

A robotic arm segment with a quad-camera array hangs centered over a miniature asphalt road, in a brightly lit modern lab setting with blurred lab equipment and server racks in the background.

Exegy, a provider of real-time market data and trading infrastructure, and MarketsIO, an independent enterprise data technology company, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at helping capital markets firms escape the grip of ageing data infrastructure. The collaboration combines Exegy's normalised, aggregated data from more than 300 global trading venues with MarketsIO's distribution, entitlements, and integration technology, offering institutions a modular migration path that preserves existing application interfaces.

The announcement arrives at a moment of mounting pressure on financial institutions' technology estates. Compliance mandates demanding greater resilience, rising data licensing costs, and the operational brittleness of incumbent platforms have pushed market data modernisation up the boardroom agenda at global banks, brokerages, and quantitative trading firms alike.

A modular alternative to rip-and-replace

The central commercial proposition is incremental migration. Rather than requiring a wholesale platform replacement, firms can modernise one feed or asset class at a time. MarketsIO's backward-compatible integration layer means that existing downstream applications, built against legacy interfaces, do not need to be rewritten. Exegy's infrastructure contributes deterministic low-latency performance and FPGA-accelerated normalisation, with the company citing recent deployments that achieved data centre footprint reductions of up to 47% while sustaining performance under peak-load conditions.

David Taylor, CEO of Exegy, framed the partnership's purpose directly: "Our partnership with MarketsIO delivers that solution, allowing firms to incrementally modernise distribution and control while preserving their existing applications. Together, we offer clients the keys to unlock their dependence on antiquated market data infrastructure."

Terry Roche, CEO of MarketsIO, added that the underlying principle is vendor independence: firms should be able to choose where they source data separately from the technology used to distribute and govern it.

Convergence angle: infrastructure debt meets fintech capital reallocation

The broader significance of this partnership sits at the intersection of financial infrastructure modernisation and the capital markets technology investment cycle. Legacy market data platforms, several of which trace their architectures to the early 2000s, have become a structural bottleneck for firms attempting to layer AI-driven analytics, cloud-native workflows, and real-time risk management on top of systems that were never designed for those use cases.

This is not simply a fintech vendor story. The inability to flexibly source and distribute real-time data constrains the velocity of quantitative model iteration, limits the speed at which trading desks can onboard new venues or asset classes, and creates regulatory exposure as resilience standards tighten across jurisdictions including the EU's DORA framework and equivalent UK operational resilience rules. Infrastructure debt, in other words, is now a compliance risk as much as a technology one.

For capital allocators watching the capital markets technology sector, the partnership signals a maturing dynamic. The incumbent platform vendors that have dominated market data distribution for two decades face a new class of modular challengers able to offer migration paths that reduce switching costs substantially. Partnerships of this kind are likely to attract attention from the private equity and growth-equity funds that have been active in financial infrastructure software in recent years, even if neither Exegy nor MarketsIO has announced external investment in connection with this announcement. The combined offering is available immediately for client integration.