A European Market for Financial Information? Some Implications of Data as 'the New Oil'

Discussions on the EU’s renewed push for capital markets integration through a Savings and Investments Union (SIU) often overlook an increasingly decisive bottleneck: whether financial data can circulate across borders with the speed, standardisation, and legal certainty that competitive capital markets require. Our paper provides some general reflections on data governance in the SIU, arguing that EU financial law is already engineering several ‘markets’ for financial information. It analyses some examples of such markets and shows the implications of the different approaches underlying them. The paper builds on a research project on data and capital markets integration coordinated by the Genoa Centre for Law and Finance in cooperation with the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna.

In answering its research questions, the paper proposes a focused way to map the regulatory approaches to foster information flow, through the lenses of two legal variables, which, we believe, structurally shape any data space. The first is data standardisation, which determines the ‘language’ of data, including whether it is machine‑readable and interoperable. The second is pricing, relating to whether data can be priced at all and, if so, whether price formation is left to bargaining or constrained through cost‑based models and caps. 

The regulatory choices taken by the EU have assumed heightened significance as the financial sector has undergone a structural shift toward externalised and highly modular forms of data processing. Nowadays, activities once performed inside firms increasingly occur across specialised nodes, collection bodies, publication arrangements, data reporting service providers, and consolidated tapes, so governance migrates from internal authority to transaction‑focused rules on sharing and interoperability. Informational integration in the United States rests on systems such as EDGAR (issuer disclosures) and the National Market System (market data). The EU, in turn, is constructing functional equivalents, most visibly through the European Single Access Point (ESAP) and consolidated tapes, precisely because data spaces are now a building block of market depth, liquidity, and ultimately strategic autonomy.

In our paper, we employ the ‘format and price’ lens to examine three EU‑level data spaces that reflect a distinct regulatory logic: 1) open finance in investment services (the proposed Framework for Financial Data Access (FIDA)); 2) issuer disclosures (ESAP); and 3) market data (the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) review and the consolidated tape regime). 

Under the European Commission’s proposed FIDA Regulation, ‘data users’ may, acting with customer permission, obtain access from ‘data holders’ that collected and store the relevant financial data. With regard to the format of data, it relies extensively on Financial Data Sharing Schemes, stakeholder organisations expected to establish the technical interface standards for sharing. On the other hand, regarding pricing, the same Schemes are tasked with determining the level of ‘reasonable’ compensation, with a cost‑based logic aligned with the Data Act’s approach to access and use of data. The proposal further introduces targeted de‑pricing measures by requiring data to be provided free of charge to SMEs and non‑profits, effectively subsidising access within the data space. 

Conversely, issuer information within ESAP follows a different institutional logic. Upstream, issuers already feed national collection bodies, including ‘Officially Appointed Mechanisms’ (OAM). These obligations are increasingly shaped by structured reporting requirements, notably XBRL-based taxonomies, which progressively embed machine-readable architecture into corporate disclosure. ESAP’s decisive move is downstream: collection bodies must transmit information to ESAP free of charge, and access through ESAP is, by design, free for the public. Format is pushed towards machine‑readability (or at least extractability) and fast availability, reinforcing the idea that issuer disclosure, once dispersed across national repositories, should operate as a core public‑facing infrastructure of the internal market. Pricing is not entirely eliminated, but is limited to dissemination services that involve high costs or are aimed at large‑volume users, and then constrained through a cost‑based cap. 

Market data after the MiFIR reform sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. In MiFIR, pre‑and post‑trade information is treated as a commodity, yet the market is engineered to overcome fragmentation and to make consolidation commercially viable. The regime operates through data reporting service providers (notably Approved Publication Arrangements) and, centrally, consolidated tape providers. The regime adopts a model of ‘competition for the market’, whereby a single independent consolidated tape provider is designated for each asset class through a licensing procedure and granted a five‑year legal monopoly, with reassignment determined through open competition at the end of each term. Standardisation is hard‑wired through machine‑readable, close‑to‑real‑time requirements, and through detailed specifications on quality, format, and timing, explicitly calibrated to usability, including for retail investors. On price, the ‘reasonable commercial basis’ standard is concretised through a cost‑plus logic and a ‘user pays’ model, while retail investors are exempted, and therefore subsidised. A redistribution mechanism is designed to allocate revenues in ways that also account for market structure features, such as primary listing and pre‑trade transparency. 

The comparison shows that EU law is not simply ‘regulating data’ as a homogeneous category, but rather oscillating between three conceptions of financial data reflecting their different functions. Market data are treated as commodified inputs, exchanged within a framework resembling a regulated-utility model. Customer data occupy a hybrid position, at the intersection between market-oriented exploitation and fundamental-rights protection, particularly regarding personal data. By contrast, issuer disclosures are increasingly conceived as part of a public informational infrastructure, characterised by free access and strong top-down standardisation. 

We conclude by identifying a set of policy uncertainties that transcend any individual legislative initiative. It remains unclear whether restrictions on compensated customer-data sharing outside the open finance framework will effectively limit extra-regulatory data circulation, or whether private data ecosystems will continue to expand under horizontal regimes such as the Data Act and the GDPR. A clear normative framework distinguishing between commodification, restricted access, and public availability through infrastructures will be key to ensuring that the EU develops advanced data structures that translate into a genuinely integrated market for financial information.

The authors’ full paper can be found here. 

Matteo Gargantini is an Associate Professor of Business Law at the University of Genova. 

Michele Siri is a Professor of Business Law at the University of Genova.