Best Counterparty Data Provider: S&P Global Market Intelligence

Developing strategies for improving counterparty data management and mitigating risk has been a priority in capital markets in recent years, and vendors that have focused on improving content sets and rolling out new functionality to help firms get data right have become invaluable. The winner of this year’s Best Counterparty Data Provider award is S&P Global Market Intelligence, a vendor that has focused on enhancing both data and analytics to assist its clients. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence launched Credit Analytics in 2014, and the offering—which has since been integrated into the S&P Capital IQ platform—delivers credit scores, models and tools to ease workflow when running risk analysis on rated, unrated, public and private companies. Whit McGraw, managing director of risk services at S&P Global Market Intelligence, says that before the launch of Credit Analytics there was a gap in the market for an offering that combined counterparty data with analytics and workflow tools. “Nobody had brought all the elements together in an easy-to-use way to enable users to assess counterparties,” he says.

The provider set out to change this, and the judges concluded that the service is now “hard to beat” and “best in class,” a verdict that builds on the vendor’s long-standing background in the counterparty data space. “Counterparty data has been one of S&P’s strong suits,” according to the judges, and the vendor is “still a strong player.”

Credit Analytics combines financial and market data with credit models, and provides users with multiple perspectives of risk, including daily early-warning signals of credit deterioration and longer-term fundamental assessments. “We have a counterparty credit solution that brings data, analytics and workflow tools together to help corporations easily look at all counterparties across their portfolios and different dimensions of risk,” McGraw says.

From a data perspective, the next step will be to continue building out the private company database that powers the offering. “We see a huge opportunity in continuing to move into the smaller to medium‑sized business space,” says McGraw.

The analytics capabilities in the offering are also continuously being enhanced, with recent changes including the addition of a macroeconomic model so users can gain insight into how their counterparty exposures will be impacted under different macroeconomic scenarios. The next focus will be on evolving modeling capabilities to take advantage of newer technologies such as machine learning, and expanding regional and country-specific models, particularly for China. “We’re building out China-specific data and modeling capabilities that will allow us to go to market with a solution that is tailored to the local market,” McGraw says.

Read more about the IMD/IRD Awards 2018 winners