A New Chapter: Nordic Capital to Accelerate BMLL’s Mission
By Paul Humphrey, Chief Executive Officer, BMLL
This is truly a proud day for BMLL, for our clients and our team as we announce that Nordic Capital is acquiring BMLL. Only a few months ago, I talked about the game-changing years we’ve had, but now, we are playing in a different league.
Let’s be clear - this is more than just an acquisition; it is a profound partnership built on a joint commitment to accelerate BMLL’s next phase of growth. With Nordic Capital by our side, along with Optiver as a minority shareholder, we are very excited about the future and the impact we will have on the way that the market thinks about and consumes historical market data. The days of the market "just about managing" with poor quality historical market data as an exhaust product from real-time incumbents are over. BMLL has set new standards in quality for historical market data. Nordic Capital’s investment, via its Evolution fund, brings firepower! We will continue to raise the bar for data quality across the industry, expand our content to new venues and time horizons and deliver more high-quality products to fulfil our clients’ demands. We will add more global markets as well as asset classes, and increase our back history, bringing the new standard in data quality to every market participant.
It’s important to say, this isn’t just our win, it’s our clients' win too
I say this personally to every client who recognised BMLL’s quality of product in the early years, and became a client before we were known as the market leader that we are today. This is your moment too! Large global firms often choose established global providers, even if the product isn’t the best available. As the old saying goes, “No one gets fired for buying IBM”. I want to personally thank every client of BMLL, and invite them to share this moment with us. I should also mention my team, their courage to invest themselves in BMLL, the sacrifices made by them (and their families!), this is the affirmation of their decisions that they all deserve.
And what a journey!
Since joining to lead BMLL at the end of 2019, it has been an amazing journey, and not for the faint-hearted! Together with my management team, we have led this company through a pandemic, three successful funding rounds, and we have trebled our staff. We’ve launched a successful presence in New York, established a Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB) with some of the biggest names in the industry, attracted over 100 clients from around the world, and built a best-in-class product. I could not be more proud.
Nordic Capital is backing our award-winning product
In today's competitive, quant-driven world, access to the most granular order book data is absolutely crucial for making better-informed trading decisions. That’s why our razor-sharp focus on data quality and harmonisation processes has been non-negotiable from the start. And our strategy is succeeding: more and more sophisticated trading firms are building their global strategies on BMLL data and placing their trust in us and our exceptional data normalisation engineering process.
This is because we have spent the past decade investing in our award-winning data coverage, engineering capabilities and analytics products. I am delighted to say that, today, BMLL’s industry penetration is significant and growing rapidly, and our Level 3 data global footprint in the market is unmatched. Our historical market data covers 100% of the MSCI All Country World Index, spanning global Equities, ETFs, Futures and US Options from 100+ trading venues.
I am exceptionally proud of everything our team has delivered over the years to make this happen, cementing our position as the trusted ‘base-layer’ of high-quality, analytics-ready data across all major exchange-traded asset classes for the global capital markets. Their commitment to excellence has successfully made us the category creator and leader we are today.
Our mandate: setting a new standard for data quality
When the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, sophisticated hedge funds, global asset managers and global liquidity providers asked us to drive data quality standards deeper into the industry, for the benefit of the wider market, we embraced the opportunity. Their vote of confidence in our data engineering capabilities completely validates the work we have done across the industry.
As I said, earlier this year, we launched our Client Product Advisory Board (CPAB) to align behind the same mission: to elevate the standard of market data for the benefit of the entire industry. It focuses on best-in-class data symbology, protocols, delivery methods and coverage needs, driven by a shared commitment to data quality. For our members (Optiver, Berenberg, Kepler Cheuvreux, Norges Bank Investment Management, State Street Global Advisors, and more), the CPAB offers early access to our Beta releases and the opportunity to shape our product roadmap. For the wider industry, it sets a gold standard for historical data.
The Nordic Capital investment will enable us to continue to respond to ideas we hear from the CPAB members and have the capacity to follow through, as we did with the launch of the industry-first TradesPlus dataset. We’re very excited to collaborate on innovative ideas with our clients. And of course, we will expand the membership of the CPAB, as more clients are expressing an interest in joining.
The market banks on our award-winning data science and engineering capabilities
When leading firms like Optiver, Kepler Cheuvreux, Broadridge, Aquis Markets, the SIX Swiss Exchange and Wamid are all building critical trading, execution and analytics capabilities directly on top of BMLL’s datasets, the message is clear - BMLL is the industry’s trusted provider of high-quality data and analytics.
As a result, we are firmly cementing the ‘buy-to-build’ trend in financial markets: owning, storing, and cleansing vast datasets is no longer a differentiator; what firms build with that trusted data now defines their edge.
Of course, the added advantage of using our data is the reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO). We take care of the data so our clients can free up their valuable quant talent to focus on innovation. By obsessing over the engineering detail, we can allow our clients' quant teams to focus on value-add activities.
Where we go from here: supercharging our growth
With the capital injection and strategic support from Nordic Capital, we can truly compete with the data provider incumbents and supercharge our mission to build the very best products. We will now focus on three key areas of investment:
Global content expansion: We will invest further in expanding global venue coverage and extending historical depth. This includes adding new asset classes such as global futures and options. Specifically, we will build out coverage in global futures markets, including Level 2 and Level 1 data feeds for futures, and develop analytics to match the quality and depth of our equity analytics.
Go-to-market engine: We will expand our go-to-market teams globally and deepen ecosystem partnerships with technology and market infrastructure providers. This includes offering our clients additional choices in how they access our products by adding more delivery mechanisms beyond our current distribution partnerships with Snowflake Marketplace, Exegy, CCData, QuantHouse, Pico, AWS Marketplace, Nasdaq Data Link, Deutsche Börse Market Data + Services, INQDATA, FactSet and CloudQuant.
- Continued innovation: We remain dedicated to fueling AI innovation by providing AI-ready, engineered, and harmonised time-series data at full Level 3 depth.
Full steam ahead
The leadership team and I are very excited about what the future holds. Democratising access to the most granular order book data at speed and scale matters now more than ever, and we are committed to delivering this high-quality data to every corner of the market.
We are determined to continue helping market participants make sense of shifting market dynamics and ultimately make better-informed decisions in a highly volatile and competitive environment.
Thank you once again, our wonderful clients and my amazing team - to our clients for choosing BMLL, and to my team for believing in my vision.
We all have work to do, let’s get on with it!
Paul Humphrey
