Notes

The headline prices held for seventeen years. What could be charged for changed.

NYSE charges the same three numbers for OpenBook today as it did in 2009. Five thousand a month for access, sixty for a professional user, fifteen for a qualifying nonprofessional. They are in the March 2009 SEC order and they are on the pricing guide dated 14 May 2026.

The title of that 2009 order tells you what was actually going on. It approves a nonprofessional fee, and it revises the unit of count that determines the device fees payable by data recipients. Even then, the pricing decision included deciding what counts.

The order defined subscribers to include both individual people and devices. On today's schedule there are three non-display categories at six thousand dollars each, and a redistribution fee of three thousand, sitting on the same page as the sixty dollar user.

None of it is buried. It is enumerated, with product codes, on a public document. This is a deliberate pricing decision and the seller is the one who makes it.

In the negotiations I have sat through, the rate gets the argument. What counts as a chargeable use gets almost none.

Before you negotiate the price, find out what you can be charged for.

RBS owned the data. Its partner owned the enrichment and the customer. The partner just sold for $230 million, cash.

The data stayed exactly where it was. The price went to the layer built on top of it.

Reward spent more than ten years building card-linked rewards on RBS transaction data, and ran the same model across dozens of banks. The offers, the merchant deals, the programme the cardholder actually sees: all Reward's. In February Rezolve, a Nasdaq-listed AI commerce company, paid $230 million for it. Not for the data. Reward doesn't own the data, it owns everything that makes the data worth acting on.

I know this structure from the inside. I was COO at Reward for many years, when we launched the RBS programme, and later CPO at dunnhumby. The data owner watches a partner build on top of their substrate and thinks the arrangement is secure because they control the supply. It is secure until someone prices the enrichment.

The rake goes to the party that owns the enrichment and the customer relationship, not the party that owns the data underneath it. If a buyer priced your data partnership tomorrow, which side would they pay for?