Every seat, every feed, every renewal.
Market data subscriptions, per-seat trading and analytics tools, overlapping risk platforms, and a regulatory obligation to explain every one of them. Financial services portfolios are expensive in a very specific way.
Financial services firms rarely have a sprawl problem in the way other sectors do. They have a concentration problem: a comparatively small number of applications carrying extraordinarily high per-seat costs, sold on agreements complex enough that nobody internally can confidently say what is being paid for.
Market data is the clearest example. Terminal and feed subscriptions are priced per user, per feed, and per redistribution right, and entitlements accumulate as people change desks. Firms routinely pay full seat cost for leavers, for staff who moved to a role that no longer needs the data, and for feeds duplicated across two desks that each believed they were the only consumer.
The second problem is evidential. Regulators expect firms to demonstrate control over the systems that touch client money, client data and trading decisions. A portfolio that nobody can produce an accurate list of is a control weakness before it is a cost problem — which means rationalization here has a compliance return as well as a financial one.
You'll recognise this if
A user-by-user reconciliation of market data entitlements against actual consumption and current role. Not a contract summary — the actual question of which named individuals hold which feeds, whether they use them, and whether the same data is being paid for twice on two desks.
This is consistently the highest-return single exercise available to a financial services firm, because the spend is large, the pricing is per-seat, and the drift between provisioned and needed entitlements accumulates silently over years of internal moves.
Firms accumulate platforms that solve substantially the same problem for different desks — a legacy risk engine kept for one book, a newer platform bought for another, a vendor tool retained because one team knows its quirks.
We map capability against capability rather than vendor against vendor, so the comparison is about what each platform is actually relied on for. Some of these overlaps are genuinely justified by regulatory segregation or asset class specifics; the point of the analysis is to establish which ones are, and stop paying for the ones that are not.
Large agreements bundle products a firm does not use, price on metrics that no longer match how the firm is structured, and carry true-up mechanics that punish inaccurate self-reporting.
We establish actual deployment against contracted entitlement before a renewal window opens, so the negotiation happens with data rather than under time pressure. Firms that walk into a renewal knowing their real consumption position negotiate from a materially different footing than firms that do not.
The by-product of doing this properly is the artefact your compliance function keeps asking for: a current, owned, evidenced inventory of the systems in use, what data each holds, who is accountable for it, and which third parties are involved.
We produce it in a form that supports operational resilience and third-party risk reporting rather than as a spreadsheet that goes stale in a quarter — including the governance step that keeps it current after we leave.
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01
Contracts, invoices and entitlement records reconciled against identity data to establish who actually holds what.
02
Actual usage against provisioned entitlement, by user and by feed, with leavers and desk moves flagged.
03
Recommendations sequenced against the renewal calendar, so each change lands at the point of maximum negotiating leverage.
04
An entitlement review tied to the joiners-movers-leavers process, plus a maintained inventory your compliance function can use.
Where This Starts
Most financial services engagements start on the licensing and entitlement side, because that is where the recoverable spend is concentrated and where results land fastest.
Software License OptimizationIt depends heavily on how long it has been since the last entitlement review and how much internal movement the firm has had. The recoverable portion is concentrated in three places: entitlements still active for leavers and desk movers, duplicated feeds across desks, and users on a higher tier than their current role requires. We size it during the assessment rather than quoting a headline percentage, because the variance between firms is very wide.
Yes. Entitlement work is administrative rather than technical — it changes what is provisioned, not what is installed. Where a change affects an active user we confirm with the desk head before it is made. Platform consolidation is a different matter and is always sequenced around trading calendars and reporting periods.
It shapes the sequencing rather than the approach. Applications supporting regulated activity in multiple jurisdictions carry the strictest applicable retention and record-keeping obligation, and we treat that as a hard constraint on retirement rather than something to be traded off against savings.
They need the same underlying asset: an accurate inventory of systems, owners, data and third parties. Firms frequently run rationalization and resilience mapping as separate exercises that each build their own version of that inventory. Doing them off one inventory is faster and produces a single artefact that stays current.
Related Insights
AI tools are being adopted one person at a time, under every approval threshold, often with no purchase at all. Same problem as shadow IT, moving far faster — and invoice-based discovery will not find it.
The real numbers behind enterprise SaaS spending — what the benchmarks say, what our client data shows, and what you can do about it.
Shadow IT costs more than the licenses. A rigorous breakdown of every way unapproved software drains your organization — and a structured approach to reigning it in.
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