BST Awards 2023: Best buy-side data management product—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

EDM is S&P Global Market Intelligence’s flagship master data management offering. It is used by over 200 clients to maximize the value of their data and streamline investment operations by delivering high-quality data throughout the organization. EDM combines public and private asset data and manages multiple, often disparate, business problems. It is complemented by the firm’s integrated Data Dictionary, which provides users with visibility of the data that is available across the enterprise.

The solution  

EDM’s component-based, configurable architecture flexes to address clients’ specific data challenges and workflow objectives. It supports all asset classes and data entities and includes configurable workflows and user dashboards. EDM enables flexible event-driven integration of data in different formats, and supports control and governance through audit trails, lifecycle visualization, and user controls. In this way, it empowers users to access data, answer questions from the business, and trust the data used in decision-making.

Secret sauce 

• EDM is a mature, feature-rich solution refined over more than 15 years based on the experiences of over 200 clients.
• Differentiators include flexibility to solve multiple business problems, implementation speed, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and compatibility with any type of structured data.
• The merger between IHS Markit and S&P Global has delivered access to a range of expertise and datasets, including sustainability and private markets data.
• EDM features an ambitious software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy.

Recent milestones

• Sustainability: Following the IHS Markit–S&P Global merger, the firm has integrated Sustainable1 and Trucost Environmental data into EDM, helping clients manage sustainability data and regulatory compliance.
• User empowerment: Delivered drag-and-drop UIs in its SaaS offering as part of the firm’s user-empowerment strategy.
• Snowflake: Integrated EDM with Snowflake providing clients with easier access to their data.
• Outsourcing: Leveraged EDM software and S&P Global resources to manage data operations for clients.

Future objectives 

• SaaS: Continuing to release more applications on the SaaS platform
• No-code/low-code: Providing data developers and stewards with the ability to define data-quality rules and metrics and apply these to datasets within EDM, using no code
• Data access: Deliver increased value and reduce time to market by integrating additional S&P Global datasets into EDM
• Pre-configured data mastering: Deliver out-of-the-box applications with tailored data models based on S&P Global’s best practice workflows

Why they won

S&P Global Market Intelligence is back on top in the best buy-side data management product category of these awards, a category it has dominated since the BST Awards were first introduced back in 2007. A cursory glance down the list of recipients over the past 17 years reveals that EDM has emerged top in this category on no fewer than 14 occasions, illustrating the extent and consistency of its dominance. Key to EDM’s buy-side appeal is its event-driven integration of data in different formats and the control and governance it provides users through audit trails and lifecycle visualization. The relatively recent introduction of the firm’s Data Dictionary―effectively a data catalogue that allows the sum total of firms’ data assets to be surfaced and “advertised” to users from across the business―has further enhanced EDM’s appeal across its traditional focus of the buy side, but increasingly now the sell side too.