Buying a feed, or owning the pipe

Buying data is the right answer for most firms. A subscription is cheap against the cost of collection, it can be cancelled, and somebody else carries the burden of keeping the series current and the sources willing.

Conventional: A data vendor
IGUAKO: An owned information division

Aspect	A data vendor	An owned information division
What is owned	A licence to use the data for a term, renewable at a price the vendor sets.	The datasets, the processing estate and the people who build both.
Provenance	Asserted in the contract. Rarely evidenced source by source.	A documented origin and a lawful basis for each dataset, under the third principle of the Charter.
Where it runs	On infrastructure the vendor chooses, in jurisdictions the vendor is free to change.	On 11.4 megawatts of owned capacity in two halls, in one jurisdiction, on dedicated hardware.
How the cost behaves	It rises with use, and again at every renewal.	It falls with use. Processing cost per pipeline fell by fifty-eight per cent from 2023 to 2026.
Exclusivity	Every competitor can buy the same feed on the same morning.	Twenty-two of the series the sector desks work from are built in house and sold to nobody.
Limits on inference	Set by the product roadmap of the vendor.	Set by the Ethics and Technology Council. No inference about an individual beyond the mandate.

It stops being the right answer when the data decides where capital goes. The institution bought a vendor in 2024 and the halls that process its output in 2023, because a research result that cannot be traced to a documented source is not a result the Investment Committee will act on.