Making market data administration simpler with AI-ready licensing intelligence

Market data is an essential part of the financial markets ecosystem. But alongside consuming the data itself, financial institutions also need to manage the licensing, entitlements, usage and invoices associated with that data.

Many of those administrative processes remain highly manual. Customers can maintain their own licensing records and reconcile invoices line by line against information provided by an exchange. Licensing rights may also be held in static documents that are not routinely referenced outside audits or invoicing queries.

As financial institutions increasingly look to automation and AI to simplify their operations, we believe the administration of market data should evolve too.

Firms devote resources to understanding licensing terms, maintaining inventories and entitlement records, validating invoices and managing usage. Today, customer data inventories can be fragmented, entitlement and billing reconciliation is frequently performed manually, and licensing rights may be held in flat PDF documents.

That creates an opportunity to simplify the relationship between data providers and their customers.

Rather than each organisation maintaining separate interpretations and records, the AI-ready automation functionality this partnership brings will allow London Stock Exchange customers to connect to the same authoritative licensing record that underpins the London Stock Exchange’s own workflows. That structured record captures customer rights, obligations and usage on DataBP’s platform.

For customers, the benefit is not simply another way to retrieve information. It creates the possibility of using their existing systems, and increasingly AI agents and assistants, to interact directly with structured licensing and invoicing information.

At the centre of the partnership is DataBP’s Licensing Ledger, which provides licensing inventory, invoices and billing history. Licensing and invoicing information can be accessed programmatically through a REST API and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

This means in-house systems, third-party platforms and AI agents can connect directly to the Licensing Ledger. Customers can query information including entitlements, permissions, usage terms and invoice line items on demand.

The MCP interface extends that capability to AI assistants and autonomous agents. These can reconcile entitlements against invoices, verify permitted uses and answer licensing and billing questions in natural language, grounded in the records governing the commercial relationship.

Access is authenticated and entitlement-scoped through the Customer Portal, so queries return only the information that the individual customer is licensed to see. The aim is not simply to add AI to an existing process. It is to give automation access to the structured, authoritative information required to make that process more efficient. 

• Less manual administration. Today, customers wanting to reconcile what they have licensed with what they have been invoiced can involve comparing internal record and invoices line by line. Through the new capability, an AI agent can instead compare licensed entitlements with invoice information and flag discrepancies for review.
• A clearer view of licensing. Connecting customers to the authoritative licensing record underpinning the London Stock Exchange’s own workflows means both sides can work from the same structured information rather than maintaining separate copies of licensing records.
• Information that can work with AI. Providing licensing information through REST APIs and MCP makes it machine-readable and available to in-house systems, third-party platforms and AI agents, subject to authenticated, entitlement-scoped access.

Together, these capabilities are intended to help customers operate more efficiently and better manage the overall cost and administrative effort associated with the market data they consume.

Reconciliation is deliberately the starting point rather than the end of the opportunity.

For the London Stock Exchange, the partnership represents more than digitising a single administrative task. It is about making the information that governs the commercial relationship more accessible to the systems and AI tools our customers increasingly use, while retaining authenticated and entitlement-scoped access.

To find out more about this initiative, please contact your Account Manager, or the London Stock Exchange Market Data team at marketdata@lseg.com.