The AI Education Revolution
08 August, 2025
Unlocking AI and Market Data Interoperability
In this episode of FinTech Focus TV, recorded live at the AI and Capital Markets Summit in New York City, host Toby is joined by Mick Hittesdorf, OneTick Cloud Product Architect at OneMarketData. Their conversation is a compelling exploration of market data, artificial intelligence, cloud transformation, and the critical role that interoperability is playing in reshaping capital markets technology. With so much changing at speed and scale, Mick shares how OneMarketData is not only adapting but actively leading on architecture strategy, AI enablement, and client-centric data solutions.
As a FinTech recruitment business, Harrington Starr recognises that innovation in capital markets is fuelled by top-tier talent, people who can architect next-gen platforms, navigate data governance, and build trust in AI ecosystems. This conversation brings those technical and strategic dynamics to life.
Modernising Market Data
Kicking off the episode, Mick introduces his role at OneMarketData, where he leads the technical architecture strategy for OneTick Cloud. He outlines a critical objective: to fully embrace what he calls “the modern data ecosystem.” That means integrating open data formats, enabling interoperability with third-party tools, and ensuring that OneMarketData customers can use best-of-breed solutions across a range of trading and data platforms.
Mick highlights that while OneMarketData excels in the tick data analytics space, its clients increasingly expect flexibility. They want to use OneTick for its strengths, like market data analytics, but also want to integrate with other tools, especially in cloud-native environments. Recognising this need, the business is doubling down on making its solutions compatible with wider ecosystems, especially for trading-adjacent use cases. This is part of a much broader trend in capital markets and FinTech, where openness and integration are fast becoming key differentiators.
Data Quality and Governance: The Unsexy Foundation of AI
A major theme throughout the discussion is the importance of data as the foundation for AI. Mick recounts his recent panel talk at the summit, where the central focus was on data readiness for AI initiatives. He explains that while AI gets the spotlight for its transformative potential, none of that potential can be realised without robust, trustworthy data underneath.
Mick emphasises that organisations need to build trust in their data, and that trust comes from investing in quality. This includes implementing a data quality programme backed by measurable metrics and deploying platforms that simplify access and management. The OneTick platform, which normalises and provides wide coverage of market data across asset classes, plays a pivotal role in this strategy. With AI and machine learning projects increasingly becoming board-level priorities in financial institutions, the demand for well-governed, high-quality data has never been higher.
Driving AI Initiatives in Capital Markets with Normalised Data
OneTick is positioned at the core of many machine learning and AI initiatives, especially in capital markets, where accurate and timely data is paramount. Mick explains that the normalisation of market data, covering equities, futures, options, and even some crypto, is a key differentiator. Normalised data ensures that firms can extract maximum value and drive AI strategies more efficiently.
The conversation turns to how OneTick supports a wide range of departments within a financial organisation: from compliance and regulatory to trading desks and analytics teams. This widespread applicability makes a strong case for open architecture. Different teams need different tools. While data scientists might want to use modern stacks for model building, compliance analysts may only need SQL. Yet both rely on the same underlying data.
To accommodate this diversity, OneTick is embracing formats like Parquet and, eventually, Iceberg, allowing customers to build cloud data lakes that remain interoperable and accessible. This shift also ensures clients maintain ownership of their data, a growing concern in an industry historically dominated by vendor lock-in.
Challenging the Legacy Model: A New Era of Openness
Mick is candid about the historical dynamics of database vendors in capital markets. For decades, firms were locked into specific platforms like Oracle or Db2, with data physically trapped in proprietary formats. This made switching difficult and innovation slow. But the industry has evolved.
Today’s financial firms want control. They want to choose their tools, structure their data lakes, and use analytics products that suit their workflows. Mick explains that OneMarketData’s approach is to support this movement by offering solutions that meet clients where they are. Whether a client wants to query data using OneTick’s native tools or use third-party platforms, the company is facilitating both.
Importantly, Mick shares that this isn’t just tolerated by OneMarketData, it’s actively encouraged. The team believes that enabling greater access to data will increase its usage, and ultimately reinforce the value of the OneTick platform, even if it’s not always the endpoint for every query. It’s a client-first, interoperability-focused strategy that aligns with the industry’s shift toward collaboration over exclusivity.
AI Built Into the Product: Not Just Enabled, Embedded
While much of the conversation focuses on enabling AI for clients, Mick also describes how OneMarketData is embedding AI into the very fabric of its own products. A standout example is a new module being developed to support natural language queries and code generation.
This innovation allows users who are not proficient in programming, like compliance officers investigating trade alerts, to interact with the platform using plain language. The system then translates these queries into executable code or SQL. By training AI models on OneTick’s robust data model and API, the team is building tools that significantly lower the barrier to advanced data analysis.
For example, if a compliance analyst is reviewing a potential insider trading or wash trade incident, they can ask questions in natural language and quickly access relevant quotes or data insights, without needing Python or SQL expertise. This is a game-changer in terms of accessibility and speed.
Mick notes that this development is possible largely because of OneTick’s commitment to normalisation and structured data models. These attributes make the training of AI models not only feasible but highly effective.
Levelling the Playing Field: Democratisation of Market Data
Toby and Mick explore the broader implications of this approach. By using AI to make sophisticated analytics more accessible, OneTick is effectively democratising market data. Smaller firms, which may not have large engineering teams, can now compete on a more even footing with larger institutions.
This democratisation also supports a cultural shift in capital markets. Instead of analytics being the sole domain of data scientists or technologists, it becomes something that compliance teams, operations staff, and even front-office users can access more directly. The ability to ask a question in natural language and get a structured data response is transformative, and it’s something OneMarketData is leading on.
The Customer Journey: Flexibility in Deployment and Ownership
Throughout the episode, Mick returns to the theme of customer empowerment. OneMarketData’s clients aren’t just asking for advanced tools; they’re demanding flexibility, ownership, and modularity. Whether a firm wants a fully managed service or prefers to own their infrastructure, OneTick offers both paths.
Mick points out that this customer-led innovation resonates strongly with the market. It’s a recognition that different firms have different appetites for control, compliance requirements, and internal capabilities. As such, OneTick supports on-prem, cloud, and hybrid deployments, all depending on what the customer needs.
In a world where legacy vendors often resist such flexibility, OneMarketData’s approach is refreshingly open. They see success not just in selling a database, but in becoming part of a client’s broader data strategy. Even if a client uses third-party tools to access the final analytics, if the data was ingested, normalised, and structured by OneTick, the platform still adds immense value.
RegTech, Data, and the Business Roadmap for 2025
As the conversation nears its end, Toby invites Mick to talk about what’s next for the company. Mick shares that OneMarketData is experiencing strong commercial performance across several business units. These include not just their market data platform, but also their growing RegTech offering and managed services.
The RegTech business, in particular, is seeing rapid adoption. Built on the foundation of OneTick’s market data expertise, it supports solutions such as transaction cost analysis and regulatory surveillance. These are critical functions for financial institutions under pressure to demonstrate compliance and optimise execution.
Additionally, OneMarketData offers access to over 200 global exchanges, covering equities, futures, options, and select crypto. Clients can obtain this data directly from OneTick’s cloud, streamlining their operations and reducing latency. This reinforces the platform’s value proposition as not just a tool, but a one-stop shop for capital markets data.
Looking forward, Mick says the focus remains on embedding AI into the product, supporting open data models, and enhancing ease of use across all deployment types. The goal is to help clients accelerate innovation, whether they operate on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment.
Conclusion: Talent and Technology at the Centre of FinTech Evolution
This episode of FinTech Focus TV is a powerful reminder that technology transformation in capital markets doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes strategy, innovation, and above all, talent.
From enabling AI through high-quality market data to building open, interoperable platforms that serve multiple user groups, OneMarketData is solving some of the industry’s biggest challenges. And as Mick Hittesdorf makes clear, these advances are only possible with strong architectural leadership, customer-centric thinking, and technical agility.
For firms building the next generation of FinTech and RegTech solutions, hiring people who can design and deliver these capabilities is essential. That’s where Harrington Starr comes in. As a FinTech recruitment business, we partner with companies like OneMarketData to find the architects, engineers, and product leaders who make digital transformation a reality.
If your business is investing in AI, data analytics, or platform modernisation, the right people will define your success. Let Harrington Starr help you find them.
