Waters Rankings 2019: Best Alternative Data Provider: S&P Global Market Intelligence

As alpha has been mined from traditional strategies, investment managers are increasingly turning to alternative datasets for insight. An astonishing range of alternative data has become important to firms in recent years, from shopping receipts to satellite images.

This still-nascent industry is here to stay, a fact that is reflected in this new category of the Waters Rankings. And the first-ever winner of the best alternative data provider award is S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The field of alternative data providers is growing rapidly, which is leading the big, established data providers to acquire some of these firms to add to their portfolio of datasets. One such example is S&P Global Market Intelligence buying Panjiva in February 2018.

Panjiva’s import and export data on supply chain relationships, trade flows and other supply chain-related economic activity for companies globally spans sectors including electronics, automotive, capital goods, agriculture, food/beverage, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. Panjiva leverages supervised and unsupervised machine-learning technologies to surface insights from unstructured supply-chain data.

S&P Global offers this alternative data through its data management system, Xpressfeed, which itself won best enterprise data management system in Waters Rankings 2018.

Clients can combine information from the global supply chain with existing S&P Global datasets, as well as their own, to create forward-looking insights. Clients can view total import and export data to analyze global supplier and customer networks, or evaluate details on product lines, map company supply-chain data to stock price movements, leverage supply-chain data as an indicator of company inventory activity, cost of goods sold, or revenue, and enhance investment models to better understand relationships in the supply chain.