BMLL Technologies named nine new hires today (Tue`sday) across partnerships, sales, revenue operations, finance and engineering, continuing the commercial and technical expansion the London-based market data firm kicked off after Nordic Capital acquired it last October.

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The new appointments follow two earlier senior hires this year, including Karen King's arrival in January as head of sales for Asia Pacific and Kevin Barrett's appointment a month later as senior sales director for listed derivatives in the US.

Together, the hires point to an accelerated rebuild of BMLL's commercial organization under its new private equity owner.

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The latest round of hires puts Deyan Kolev on the executive management team as head of corporate development and partnerships, reporting to chief executive Paul Humphrey. Kolev previously held roles at Tradeweb, Informa, Euronext and NYSE.

On the go-to-market side, BMLL hired Mo Badlani from Lightkeeper as senior sales director for hedge funds in the US, with Nick Haydon joining as senior sales director for enterprise from London Stock Exchange Group, where his career has also included stints at FIS and Thomson Reuters.

Mariel Solomon, previously at LogicMonitor and Moody's Analytics, takes on the role of head of revenue operations. The recruitment push extends the pattern set by Kevin Barrett's February appointment as US derivatives sales lead, which the company had flagged as part of its futures expansion.

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“When Nordic Capital came on board, we made our intentions very clear, and we continue to deliver on this mission,” Humphrey commented. “We continue to invest globally in broadening venue and asset class coverage, increasing our years of history, expanding our team and deepening our partnerships.”

The supporting appointments include Theo Lane as head of digital marketing, Paolo Ferri as financial controller, and three engineers: Wojciech Wojtkowski, Ryan Henzell-Hill and Robert Anderson. BMLL said further hires across research, product and sales are planned for the second quarter.

Competition Heats Up for Granular Historical Data

The recruitment push lands in a market for granular historical data that is becoming more crowded. BMLL's core product sits in the niche of Level 3, 2 and 1 historical data across global equities, ETFs, futures and US equity options, putting it up against both large incumbents and specialist rivals.

Bloomberg, LSEG's Refinitiv and ICE Data Services have all widened cloud-delivered data arrangements in recent years. On the specialist side, US-based Databento sells nanosecond-precision data via cloud APIs and launched its own Databricks integration in 2024, while Kaiko has pushed similar distribution deals for digital-asset order book records. LSEG itself moved deeper into low-latency data after acquiring MayStreet in 2022.

BMLL has been trying to differentiate through breadth of historical coverage and cloud-native delivery. Earlier this month, the company plugged its datasets into Databricks, adding to existing access via Snowflake Marketplace, AWS S3, API and SFTP. In February, it teamed up with Features Analytics to build market abuse benchmarking products, extending its data into compliance-oriented workflows.

Product Pipeline Runs Alongside Hiring

Humphrey has repeatedly tied BMLL's positioning to rising demand from AI-driven research workflows, and that framing reappeared in Tuesday's announcement.

Quantitative teams at banks, asset managers and hedge funds increasingly want standardized, ready-to-use historical datasets to train models and test strategies, which has opened an opportunity for vendors that can deliver content inside the cloud environments those teams already use.

The product pipeline reflects that bet. In September, BMLL launched its Trades Plus execution analytics dataset after feedback from members of its Client Product Advisory Board, billing it as the first product built directly from customer input.

In March, the firm opened a year-long pilot with Tradefeedr to extend transaction cost analysis from FX into equities and futures. Over the past 14 months, it has also added Asian exchange feeds including Shanghai, Bombay and ASX 24 futures.