Financial firms are rapidly increasing their focus on data testing as they modernise their technology infrastructure to cope with rising data volumes, message rates, and tightening regulatory expectations. As innovation accelerates, cloud-based testing solutions are becoming critical to ensure performance, compliance, and resilience.
LSEG’s Test Data as a Service is designed to help firms accelerate their technology rollouts with confidence that systems are both robust and fully compliant.
The surge in data volumes underscores the need for reliable testing. Between 2021 and 2023, LSEG recorded a 66% increase in market data volumes, far outpacing the 13% annual growth rate of previous years. The company expects message rates to peak at 50 million per second across all asset classes, up from around 15 million today. This rapid expansion highlights how essential rigorous testing has become for maintaining stability and operational resilience.
Inadequate data testing poses significant risks for financial institutions. Failure to conduct proper testing can lead to system disruptions, reputational damage, and financial losses. Regulatory expectations are also intensifying. The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which came into force in January 2025, and the UK’s own operational resilience requirements implemented in March 2025, both mandate that firms demonstrate preparedness against technology disruptions. A well-structured testing strategy can help mitigate these risks by proactively identifying weaknesses before they escalate into incidents.
Developing strong testing practices requires careful planning, LSEG explained. Firms should first understand how their applications are expected to perform under operational and regulatory conditions, assess historical market extremes such as volatility, and set parameters for both normal and stressed scenarios.
Once this groundwork is complete, testing plans should define clear objectives, scope, and deliverables.
LSEG’s cloud-based Test Data as a Service simplifies this process by providing access to decades of historical data through its Tick History database, which dates back to 1996. Users can select specific data sets reflecting real-world events and test how applications perform under varying levels of stress or volatility.
The system’s Replayer tool then runs the chosen data in continuous loops, while the Real-Time Connector integrates the data stream into firm applications using LSEG APIs.
The service can be deployed within 24 hours under either a 30-day or 12-month contract, offering firms flexibility for both long-term operational testing and short-term proof-of-concept projects.
For more insights, read the full story here.
Read the daily FinTech news
Copyright © 2025 FinTech Global
