BST Awards 2018: Best Buy-Side Data Management Provider—IHS Markit

Once again, London-based IHS Markit has won the best buy-side data management provider category at the Buy-Side Technology Awards, a category it has dominated in these awards for more than a decade, thanks to its widely-used Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform. 

Spiros Giannaros, managing director and global head of enterprise data management at IHS Markit, says the company consistently advances its technology and content services, factors that have led to the platform’s continued growth since it joined the IHS Markit stable from Cadis just over six years ago. “Other platforms solve a specific issue for data, but we want to manage not just reference data or regulatory reporting data—we want to be there for the curation process, to create the data and offer information for investment and risk analytics,” Giannaros says. 

He adds that preventing the emergence of data silos within user-firms is one of the company’s goals, which is why EDM encourages clients to manage the bulk of their data-related functions on the platform. He says the user interface was developed so that insights can be resolved within EDM without users having to resort to separate analytics tools, although those that require advanced analytics can still leverage third-party tools like data lakes. The company is able to manage this by way of its data warehouse offering, which stores historical data that may be called upon for any analytics or regulatory reports and which was recently integrated with the platform. Another key integration it undertook in the past year was with thinkFolio, the firm’s order management and portfolio modeling system that won the best buy-side OMS category in last year’s awards. This allows clients to generate consistent data flows, according to Giannaros. He points out that integrating more synergistic products to the EDM offering means that clients no longer need to maintain multiple different vendor systems, but rather stick to fewer providers, a trend he sees growing. 

Markit EDM has expanded its use of non-financial data, including geospatial datasets, increasingly utilized by clients in the energy and asset management industries. Giannaros says these new datasets have been a key interest for clients, so much so that the firm has even been able to offer the same product to different verticals. 

For next year, Giannaros says IHS Markit will continue to grow its managed services platform for EDM, especially as smaller firms need these services to keep up with their competitors. The company also hopes to expand EDM with new capabilities around data, including multi-language support. This will mean further insight into different kinds of data and expanding the reach of the product.