Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor: IHS Markit

An effective data management system is crucial to the operations of financial firms as it sits at the heart of every key business function. IHS Markit has positioned itself as the dominant player in this space by consistently evolving its enterprise data management (EDM) platform, and wins Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor for a second consecutive year.

At its core, EDM pulls disparate data types from multiple sources into a central hub and validates, masters, transforms and distributes the content for clients’ key business operations. “We are a business user‑driven platform, so we put the data management capabilities in the hands of the users. Typically in this space, EDM systems are a technical offering and we’ve differentiated ourselves by being able to do complex workflows in a usable way,” says Andrew Eisen, global head of EDM at IHS Markit.

More than 200 buy- and sell-side clients use EDM, and it continues to grow its footprint, adding 23 clients last year alone. According to the company, data management use cases have expanded from core reference data into account, position, product, legal entity, transaction and regulatory datasets. As use cases expand, the company too has grown its remit from core data management to data warehousing, data delivery and data governance.

On the buy side, the ever-changing reporting landscape continues to drive demand for its data warehousing capabilities, while on the sell side the business is seeing a continued focus on data optimization. Recently added visualization tools help clients view and analyze their data consumption.

EDM can also be deployed via IHS Markit’s managed services, available on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Between 40% and 60% of new clients start with a cloud implementation, Eisen says, and the company is seeing an increase in interest from clients who have traditional enterprise software deployments to migrate to the cloud.

One of the major developments for the business over the past year has been applying EDM to other verticals, starting with energy. Already, the company has onboarded 15 customers within the energy space. Expanding EDM to manage non-financial data offers the potential to bring IHS’s proprietary datasets in other industries to EDM financial services clients. For instance, geo-spatial datasets, which provide details on oil well production, the location of wells and their depth, could also be of interest to EDM’s financial services clients who use alternative data to support their investment decisions.

“We are looking to expand into other verticals in which IHS Markit has deep client relationships and industry understanding, such as the automotive, aerospace and maritime and trade industries, where operational data quality remains a challenge,” says Eisen. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners