Franz Schrandt named DKF Market Data Person of the Year 2026
We are proud to share that Franz Schrandt, Managing Director and founder of BIQH, has been awarded Market Data Person of the Year 2026 at the DKF Financial Information Congress in Munich, Germany.
About the award
The DKF Market Data Person of the Year award recognises individuals who have made a lasting contribution to the market data industry. It highlights long-term impact, innovation, and the ability to shape how financial data is managed and used across the sector.
A career built on innovation
According to Alexis Eisenhofer from DKF, Franz Schrandt receives this year’s award in recognition of more than 25 years of entrepreneurship in the market data industry. Throughout his career, he has been involved in new ideas, products, and services at key moments in the sector’s development, from introducing the first real-time streaming market data terminal for private investors in the Netherlands, to his involvement in launching the first website in the country to display real-time financial data, to founding BIQH.
That background in consumer-facing market data, particularly during the formative years of online investing between 2000 and 2008, left a lasting mark. Making complex information accessible to private investors requires one thing above all: clarity. As Einstein put it, if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it enough. It is a principle Franz has carried with him ever since.
That same philosophy shapes BIQH. The complexity of institutional market data is real, with hundreds of thousands of instruments, dozens of data vendors, countless downstream systems, each with their own formats and rules. But complexity in the underlying problem is no excuse for complexity in the solution. BIQH exists to bring structure to that chaos: consolidating data from multiple vendors, creating a single validated source of truth, and distributing it to the systems that need it, clearly, transparently, and without unnecessary friction.
That experience also gave Franz a firsthand view of a problem that has never been properly solved: market data delivery dominated by a small group of large international vendors, platforms built decades ago, deeply embedded through long contracts and high switching costs. The result for financial institutions has been fragmented data landscapes, rising costs, and limited room to move.
BIQH was his answer to that problem, and that same conviction still drives it today.
What BIQH stands for
Financial institutions deserve a vendor-independent alternative. One that is transparent in its pricing, agile in its delivery, and genuinely close to its customers. Not just another supplier, but an external colleague.
Clients such as ABN AMRO, Rabobank, and DekaBank have experienced firsthand what it means to work with a team that speaks the language of both data vendors and financial institutions, and that moves at a pace the larger players simply cannot match.
Franz Schrandt’s recognition as Market Data Person of the Year is, in that sense, also a recognition of what BIQH stands for: that a European, independent alternative not only has a place in this market, it has a growing one.
