Head of Market Data

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

The Executive Head Market Data is the first line business owner accountable for the end to end delivery, governance, and optimisation of market data services across Global Markets. The role ensures that market data platforms and services effectively support electronic trading, quantitative research, pricing, risk management, and broader Global Markets stakeholders. Balancing regulatory and operational risk management with innovation, scalability, and cost efficiency, the role owns the commercial, operational, engineering, and governance dimensions of market data. It ensures market data is fit for purpose, resilient, compliant, and strategically aligned to the bank’s trading and risk objectives. The role provides single-point executive accountability for market data as a critical production service, ensuring resilience, regulatory compliance, cost discipline, and alignment to the bank’s technology strategy while enabling data-driven decision-making and front-office performance

Job Description

Strategy, Governance and Oversight

• Defining and owning the Global Markets market data strategy aligned to business objectives and enterprise technology strategy.
• Acting as first-line accountable owner for market data across Global Markets.
• Ensuring compliance with vendor contracts, internal policies, and applicable regulatory requirements.

• Owning audit readiness, regulatory responses, and ongoing control assurance for market data.
• Providing executive-level reporting on market data cost, risk, service performance, and strategic initiatives.

Vendor and Commercial Management

• Executive accountability for vendor engagement, commercial strategy, and contract outcomes.
• Oversight of contract negotiations, renewals, and commercial risk, with execution delegated where appropriate.
• Ownership of license forecasting, cost optimisation, and financial transparency for market data spend.
• Ensuring vendor performance aligns with contractual, operational, and regulatory expectations.

Access, Entitlements and Audit

• Accountability for entitlements and user access governance across all market data platforms.
• Ensuring usage monitoring aligns with vendor terms and regulatory obligations.
• Owning regulatory and vendor audit defence related to data usage, access, and controls.

Engineering, Integration and Operations

• Executive accountability for real-time market data distribution platforms and associated operational services.
• Ownership of platform resilience, disaster recovery validation, and incident management outcomes.
• Accountability for onboarding new market data feeds and datasets into the Global Markets ecosystem.
• Ownership of the market data engineering roadmap, including feeds, APIs, normalisation, and integration patterns, aligned to enterprise architecture standards.

Data Management and Quality

• Accountability for data availability, reliability, and fitness for purpose.
• Ownership of the market data quality framework, including controls, monitoring, and remediation.
• Oversight of data transformation, enrichment, and distribution standards to ensure consistency and usability across consumers.

Service Management and Demand

• Ownership of market data as a production service to trading desks, quantitative teams, and risk functions.
• Accountability for demand intake, prioritisation, and delivery of market data capabilities.
• Ownership of service performance, including SLAs, incident trends, and continuous improvement.

KEY FOCUS AREAS

• Leading and developing teams responsible for market data operations, engineering, governance, and commercial management.
• Establishing clear operating models, delegation, and control structures to support scalable service delivery.
• Collaborating with Front Office, Risk, Technology, Architecture, Finance, Compliance, and Procurement stakeholders.
• Ensuring alignment between market data platforms and broader Global Markets and Group technology initiatives.
• Driving continuous improvement in cost efficiency, resilience, data quality, and time-to market for new data capabilities

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

Education/ Qualification:

Post Graduate Degree or an MBA: in Technology or Data Management or a relevant discipline

Work Experience:

• 10+ years’ experience in market data, trading technology, or markets enablement within financial services
• Proven experience operating in or alongside Global Markets environments
• Demonstrated accountability for regulatory, licensing, and operational risk
• Experience managing large-scale vendor relationships and commercial contracts

Education

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised