Financial market data is the information that fund managers, analysts and traders read before they decide what to buy or sell. It includes the price of each share and bond, the accounts of companies, credit ratings, indices, research, and advice on how to vote at shareholder meetings.
A handful of companies produce most of this data. They keep a very large share of what they earn as profit. Nearly all of them run very large research and engineering centres in India. Much of the world's financial data is collected, checked and built into products there.
Consider a fund manager who must decide whether to buy a company's bonds. First, she looks up the bond's grade from a credit rating agency. The grade shows how likely the company is to repay, much as a credit score does for a person. Then she checks how the bonds of similar companies are priced on a financial data terminal. She also reads a research note about the company. More and more, an AI model drafts such notes from company filings, and an analyst checks them.
Two other products in this zone set the standards against which funds work. An index provider calculates indices such as the Nifty 50. Index funds copy an index, and other funds are judged against one. Proxy advisory and ESG ratings firms tell large investors how to vote at a company's shareholder meetings. ESG stands for environmental, social and governance. An ESG rating grades how a company treats the environment, its staff and its shareholders.
All this data is expensive. A large firm pays for hundreds of terminal licences and data feeds. So it uses market data management software to track who uses which one. Many other industries also buy data from specialist companies. The page on data providers covers them.