BMLL has added Five Rings, a New York proprietary trading firm, to the advisory board it uses to shape its product roadmap, the market data company said today (Thursday). The move puts a second prop firm on a panel that already counts some of the biggest names in institutional finance.
Five Rings joins the Client Product Advisory Board alongside Berenberg, Kepler Cheuvreux, Norges Bank Investment Management, Optiver, Rothschild & Co Redburn, State Street Global Advisors and Stifel.
BMLL said the firm trades across asset classes and leans on detailed historical data to test ideas and refine its quantitative research.
"BMLL's high-quality data and research environment have become instrumental," Parker Lim, head of special projects at Five Rings, added in a statement.
A Client Board That Doubles as a Sales Tool
BMLL launched the advisory board in February 2025 and uses it to gather feedback on data standards, delivery formats and coverage gaps.
The company has turned that input into product, releasing its Trades Plus execution analytics dataset last September as the first tool built directly from board members' requests.
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One member, Optiver, sits on both sides of the table. The Amsterdam market maker is a minority shareholder in BMLL and led a $21 million investment in the company in October 2024, which means a part-owner now shares an advisory forum with a competing prop firm.
Paul Humphrey, BMLL's chief executive, said the company was "delighted to welcome a highly sophisticated firm like Five Rings to the community." BMLL did not disclose commercial terms or say whether Five Rings is a paying client.
Crowded Market for Granular Historical Data
BMLL, which describes itself as an independent provider of harmonized Level 3, 2 and 1 historical order book data, competes in a segment that has drawn both startups and exchange groups.
Its pitch is that clients can rent curated, normalized data rather than buy and clean it themselves.
Rivals are pushing on the same workflows. Databento sells nanosecond-precision data through cloud-delivered APIs and added a Databricks integration in 2024, while Kaiko has built similar distribution for digital asset order book records.
Exchange operators including Nasdaq and CME Group have moved more of their historical content into cloud marketplaces, in some cases bundled with their own analytics.
BMLL has answered by stacking distribution deals and partner content on top of its core dataset. In April it plugged its data into Databricks, and it has layered third-party options analytics onto its own records to widen coverage without building everything in house.
Nordic Capital Pushes a Commercial Buildout
The advisory board addition lands during a busy stretch for the company, which Nordic Capital acquired in October 2025 in a deal struck alongside Optiver. Since then the London-based firm has stepped up hiring and product work.
In April it disclosed nine new hires across partnerships, sales, revenue operations, finance and engineering, and days later added SpiderRock's US options data to its research environment.
In March it opened a year-long pilot with Tradefeedr to extend transaction cost analysis from foreign exchange into equities and futures.
Options data has been a particular focus. BMLL first launched six years of nanosecond OPRA records in November 2024, and the company now says it offers more than seven years, sitting alongside its US equity and futures datasets.
