Euronext responds to our article ‘Euronext declares war on alternative venues with 900% data fee hikes’
On 19 March 2026, Global Trading published an article on the evolution of Euronext’s real-time market data fees. Euronext strongly disagrees with the narrative put forward by the article. The upcoming changes to Euronext’s real-time market data fees are a response to new European regulatory requirements on the pricing of market data on a Reasonable Commercial Basis (RCB). These rules require European exchanges to fundamentally rethink how market data is priced across user categories.
These changes in real-time market data fees cannot be linked to the Market Integration and Structure Package (MISP), as both stem from two completely different regulatory timelines. Euronext’s new pricing framework regarding real-time market data has been engineered under the new RCB regulatory regime, part of the MiFID/R Refit finalised in 2024, before the announcement of the MISP package by the European Commission in December 2025.
Under the new RCB framework, exchanges must move away from highly granular, use case specific pricing models toward a simpler structure that is grounded in cost-plus-margin principles and applied consistently across the same type of users. This inevitably means that the structure of fees looks totally different from the past and is not comparable to the previous fee structure.
Euronext’s new real-time market data fee grid has been constructed based on Euronext’s existing clients at the time of the redesign. As a result of this transition, some market participants will see lower fees and others higher fees, depending on how they currently consume market data and how that usage maps into the new client categories.
What matters in this context is not the change in individual price points, but the overall market data spend of a given client based on their actual usage. Regarding trading venue clients specifically, it is important to note that the vast majority of trading venues in Europe are part of broader Groups, therefore having contracts with Euronext at their Group level regarding market data fees. The example given in the article is theoretical and does not exist in Euronext’s current client base.
Euronext has designed its new fee model with the objective of regulatory compliance and broad accessibility to market data. The exercise is not intended to target or disadvantage any specific category of market participant, including systematic internalisers, sell-side firms or alternative trading venues. On the contrary, the redesigned structure reflects Euronext’s broader goal of a more equitable and accessible data ecosystem.
As shown by the Oxera Report published in 2024, exchange market data revenues have been stable over the past five years, with a 3% average annual nominal growth. In total, European exchanges generate around €350m annual revenues on market data, which represents only a fraction of the costs incurred by European sell-sides and buy-sides. Market data produced by European exchanges, via extensive normalisation, filtering and re-ordering to make them easily absorbable by users, are pivotal to support European and global participants’ activity on European markets.
Euronext recognises that any structural change to market data pricing raises questions for users and continues to engage with market participants to explain the regulatory context and the mechanics of the new model. This is a regulatory driven transition that is affecting the entire European market data landscape, and similar adjustments can be expected across the industry as other exchanges implement the same rules.
Ultimately, the aim of the new framework is to ensure that market data pricing in Europe is transparent, cost-based and aligned with regulatory expectations, while supporting continued access to high quality, reliable market data for a wide range of users.
