IMD & IRD Awards 2020: Best Enterprise Data Management Vendor—IHS Markit

For the third consecutive year, IHS Markit collects the Readers’ Survey award for Best Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Vendor, marking a stellar run for the London-headquartered company.

IHS Markit EDM helps customers overcome the challenges of managing multiple datasets from multiple platforms. Its EDM platform acquires, validates and distributes trade, operational, financial and customer data, effectively creating a single, and fully auditable, version of the truth. As a result, users benefit from better control and greater understanding of their data, as well as improved compliance.

The platform was originally designed for the buy side and IHS Markit enjoys a long-standing heritage in the asset management community, with examples of recent customer wins including Western Asset Management and Pzena Investment Management. However, IHS Markit EDM has travelled a long way since those early days and is today a well-established sell-side provider, though the company notes the differing approaches to data management between the two sides. The buy side, for instance, tends to require a consolidated approach to data challenges across the front, middle and back office, while the sell-side prefers a more focused approach to specific business challenges.

Key to IHS Markit’s success is the flexibility of its EDM platform. It is built from the ground up, enabling it to offer flexibility over any client-specific requirements and integration needs. It can also adapt to the constant changes required to meet regulatory, organizational and market demands.

This same flexibility is also allowing IHS Markit to expand beyond financial services and into new sectors, notably energy and maritime. When interviewed by WatersTechnology in July 2020, James Penniman, vice president and global head of business for the EDM platform at IHS Markit, said: “The energy and maritime industries are going through the same issues today that the financial services industry went through 10 years ago, such as [a reliance on] Excel spreadsheets, access to data, multiple siloes, and how to pull together and validate that data, and make actionable decisions off it.”

This expansion into new sectors is a key objective for IHS Markit over the coming year, as is its continuing work with customers to build out more customizable features and functionality on the platform.

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2020 winners