What Brazil's Market Structure Tells Us About the Next Phase of Market Data Infrastructure

Executive Summary 

FISD Latam 2026 highlighted Brazil as a lens for understanding the next phase of market data infrastructure in Latin America. The market is shaped by several converging forces: a historically B3-led structure, growing OTC and non-exchange data needs, emerging venue competition, licensing complexity, and the rise of digital finance through Drex, tokenisation, and on-chain data. 

The key lesson is that Brazil's market data challenge is no longer about acquiring more data. It is about building a source-neutral, application-neutral data layer that can absorb, normalise, govern, and distribute data across multiple venues, vendors, asset classes, and applications — flexible enough to keep pace with a market that is changing on multiple fronts simultaneously. 

Brazil as a Microcosm of LATAM Market Data Change 

FISD Latam 2026, held in São Paulo, brought together practitioners across market data, exchange structure, OTC data, licensing, digital assets, and tokenisation to examine where Latin American capital markets are heading. One thread ran consistently through the conversations: the infrastructure question. 

Brazil is a useful focal point not just because of its scale, but because of the combination of forces active within it — a historically concentrated exchange structure, a growing OTC and non-exchange data landscape, rapidly advancing digital financial infrastructure, and early signs of new venue competition. That combination makes it an unusually instructive case for thinking about what market data infrastructure needs to look like next. The challenge is no longer about acquiring more data. It is about building a layer that can absorb, normalise, and govern data across an increasingly complex set of sources and applications. 

From B3 Dominance to Multi-Source Complexity: Why Source Neutrality Matters 

Brazil's market structure has long been defined by B3's central role. When a single venue dominates price discovery, settlement, and data distribution, the operational model for market data follows naturally: build around that venue, optimise for that feed, model your architecture on that data schema. 

That logic is now under pressure. Base Exchange, backed by Mubadala, is targeting a launch in late 2026 or early 2027 with the explicit objective of introducing competitive pressure into a market that has long operated without it. A second venue would immediately complicate price data, execution data, post-trade data, best execution analysis, and liquidity analytics — not to mention diverging licensing conditions and reference data alignment that becomes an infrastructure project in itself. 

This is the context in which source neutrality shifts from an architectural preference to an operational necessity — a data layer not optimised for any particular exchange or vendor, but capable of absorbing inputs from multiple venues and normalising them into a consistent internal representation. Brazil is instructive here precisely because this pressure is building before the competitive market structure has fully materialised. Forward-looking institutions are not waiting for the transition to be complete. 

OTC and Non-Exchange Data: A Core Dimension of Brazil's Data Challenge 

The opening panel at FISD Latam focused on OTC and non-exchange market data — a framing that reflects how Brazil's data landscape actually works in practice. 

B3's market data offering already reflects this complexity, spanning derivatives, foreign exchange, OTC markets, reference prices, and collateral alongside equities. OTC data in particular tends to be more fragmented and less standardised than exchange data: price formation is less transparent, data access varies, and quality controls differ across providers. 

For financial institutions, the core challenge is not access — it is integration. Obtaining OTC pricing data is one problem. Ensuring it flows coherently into front office, risk, operations, and compliance systems — without manual transformation at each handoff — is a harder one. It requires data from structurally different sources to be normalised into a shared semantic model before reaching downstream applications. Brazil's market data challenge cannot be defined narrowly around exchange feed consumption. The more accurate framing is the ability to connect exchange data, OTC data, reference data, pricing data, and regulatory data into a single operational model — one that does not require each consuming application to solve the normalisation problem independently. 

Licensing, Regulation, and Governance: Connectivity Is Not Enough 

The second panel at FISD Latam addressed exchange and vendor licensing — a topic that carries significant operational consequences in practice, even if it is frequently underweighted in infrastructure discussions. 

As data sources multiply, so does licensing complexity: entitlements, redistribution rights, derived data authorisation, and usage tracking across internal departments, external clients, and automated systems. Base Exchange's entry into the market will add a new set of licensing terms to an environment that already contains B3 data, OTC data, and a range of local and global vendor feeds. Digital asset data will bring further complexity. 

In that environment, a data layer that connects sources is necessary but not sufficient. Institutions also need to explain, at any point, where data originated, how it was transformed, and what the applicable usage rights are. This is the distinction between a connected data layer and a governed data layer — one that treats usage rights management, lineage tracking, auditability, and licensing control as first-class infrastructure concerns, not operational afterthoughts. This is the kind of problem aurelia, bccg's vendor-neutral application adaptor, is built to sit inside — maintaining a single, auditable record of where data originated and how it has been transformed, regardless of how many venues or vendors sit upstream. 

Digital Assets and Tokenisation: Where Traditional and On-Chain Data Converge 

The third panel covered digital assets, tokenisation, blockchain, stablecoins, and CBDCs — and in Brazil's case, this is not a forward-looking discussion. It is a present one. 

Brazil's central bank began testing its Drex platform in March 2023 and onboarded pilot participants in July of that year, making Brazil one of a small number of markets where the integration of on-chain infrastructure with regulated financial systems is a live operational question. McKinsey's Brazil Stack analysis documents the broader ecosystem: Pix, Open Finance, blockchain-based financial infrastructure, digital identity, and growing stablecoin usage. 

For market data, tokenised assets generate a distinct data lifecycle — issuance records, ownership state, on-chain transaction history, collateral status, regulatory classification — that traditional infrastructure was not designed to track. Pricing data, reference data, risk data, and on-chain transaction data need to flow through a unified architecture. That architecture is also the prerequisite for AI-readiness: machine learning and automation can only operate reliably on data that is already connected, normalised, and trustworthy. 

The Conclusion FISD Latam Points Toward 

The discussions at FISD Latam 2026 converge on a clear structural observation: Brazil's market data environment is becoming more complex across every dimension simultaneously — venue structure, OTC coverage, licensing, digital assets, regulatory oversight. 

The answer is not more data. It is a source-neutral, application-neutral market data layer — one that absorbs inputs from multiple venues and vendors, normalises them into a consistent representation, manages usage rights and lineage, and delivers data consistently to whichever applications need it. That architecture has to be designed for change, not for the current state of any particular market. At bccg, aurelia is designed around exactly that premise — a layer that connects venues, vendors, and applications without requiring any one of them to be replaced, and that can absorb whatever comes next, whether that's a second data source, a new asset class, or a new regulatory regime 

As markets become more complex, data infrastructure needs to become simpler, more flexible, and more governed. That is the direction Brazil's market evolution is making necessary — and the direction bccg is building toward.