Witad Awards 2023: Above and beyond award (vendor)—Justine Iverson, S&P Global Market Intelligence

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Justine Iverson is always thinking about going further. She advises anyone looking to break into the data and technology space to “take a process approach and be flexible, and know that careers and opportunities compound but often aren’t perfectly linear, so take each opportunity as one to add a skillset or expand your knowledge in a new area.”

Iverson’s own career path wasn’t linear. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in journalism before taking a job at an advertising agency where she got to do a little bit of everything: creative work, public relations and marketing. “I enjoyed working with different clients, but I love digging in and that’s obviously why I love product,” she says.

She moved in-house to IHS Markit in a marketing role but after a few years moved to a quant asset manager where again she got to dabble in a bit of everything: marketing, sales, operations, and product. Iverson joined S&P Global Market Intelligence in 2019 and she felt like everything had connected. She had been unknowingly preparing herself for her role at S&P.

Today, she heads up S&P Global Marketplace, an offering that Iverson says has grown to become an enterprise data discovery platform. Part of that evolution is thanks to the merger of S&P Global and IHS Markit that was completed last year. “When you merge S&P Global and IHS Markit, your data estate becomes massive and confusing, not just for our clients, but also our work,” she says.

For the last year, Iverson and her team have worked to place the new data assets acquired into Marketplace across all six divisions of S&P. “It’s been really, really rewarding to see that work progress,” she says.

Iverson has also been doing work to prepare the next generation of leaders in fintech. While completing her MBA, she was taken aback by the stale data her professor was using in a data analytics class. “Why aren’t we providing this data to students in a way that they can get firsthand experience with our data and leading technology?” she remembers asking herself. Her ideation resulted in a partnership between S&P, Snowflake and the University of Toronto. “We’re helping students become better equipped for the workforce,” she says. It hasn’t stopped there; S&P is currently in a proof of concept with Villanova University and Databricks.