Sell-Side Technology Awards 2019: Best Sell-Side Data Management Product—IHS Markit

An effective data management system is crucial to the livelihood of all sell-side firms. It sits at the heart of every business function and impacts all corners of the business. Today, data transformation projects are one of the top priorities across all major institutional banks. IHS Markit has positioned itself as the dominant player in this space for best part of a decade by consistently building out the functionality of its Enterprise Data Management (EDM) platform. It therefore comes as no surprise that it has once again emerged as the winner of the best sell-side data management product category in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, its fourth consecutive win in this perennially competitive category.  

Markit EDM acquires, validates and distributes data to and from all corners of the business—including trade, operations, risk, finance, and customer data. It operates on a single version of truth, enabling full control and visibility of data lineage, and allows for detailed monitoring and auditing to help simplify regulatory reporting requirements. According to IHS Markit, the firm is working toward building out an end-to-end data ecosystem, focusing on four components: data management, data warehousing, data delivery, and data governance. It is also developing a proprietary data dictionary to provide internal data definitions and visualization for end-users and third-party dictionaries in order to support new application programming interfaces (APIs) and other data-related technologies. 

Over the last year, IHS Markit has rolled out new data visualization tools to enable clients to more easily monitor and optimize their data consumption. Viewable through customizable dashboards and interactive visuals, sell-side firms can more easily audit usage and manage the costs of outsourcing data to third-party providers. “It’s about specializing in operational data in a way that business users can quickly get to the root of the problem and resolve it,” explains Andrew Eisen, senior vice president and global head of enterprise data management at IHS Markit. “It’s where you can see the history and the relationships between the data and get to the root of the issue quickly,” he says 

The vendor is focusing on building out solutions for sell-side use-cases such as independent price verification and product control. For each implementation, applications and workflows can be specifically customized to the needs of sell-side clients. EDM can be deployed through IHS Markit’s managed service, available on the Amazon Web Services cloud (see page 73). 

Over the next year or so, IHS Markit intends to enhance the platform’s user interface and provide users with a rich, interactive experience. Another core focus for the firm over the coming months is to improve and accelerate its implementation process and deployment capabilities.