The mission of the Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA) is to develop and provide relevant global data and advanced tools to promote and enable financial research and innovation, particularly by member universities. SIRCA was founded in 1997 by a group of collaborating Australian and New Zealand universities as a not for profit company. SIRCA was created to support the needs of academic researchers, in a world where data volumes were accelerating dramatically. The original group of founding universities has been joined by many more over the years; SIRCA now counts over 35 universities in Australia and New Zealand as Members, in addition to international universities, central banks, regulators and public sector agencies. Thanks to the support of a number of commercial organisations, SIRCA provides its Members with access to vast and comprehensive online repositories of global news and financial markets data. Given the scale of the international financial markets data which it handles, SIRCA needed to pioneer a number of processes which lie at the heart of today’s big data and data science challenges. SIRCA’s technology expertise is now second-to-none in terms of the processing of large-scale and complex financial markets data.