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

Overview

iLevel Managed Data Services centralizes critical information about clients’ private investment portfolios using data-ingestion technology and human-in-the-loop processing. It specializes in processing financial and operational reporting from fund managers, portfolio companies and borrowers. S&P Global Market Intelligence has launched a separate, complementary data management-as-a-service offering, which draws on its Enterprise Data Management (EDM) software and wider S&P Global resources and data estate to manage data operations on behalf of clients.

The solution  

iLevel Managed Data Services functionalizes the end-to-end private markets data workflow into the following core components: source document collection, data extraction, data review, standardization, exception management, and service delivery. The firm’s service leverages best-in-breed technology at each step of the process and subject matter expertise, resulting in fast data processing and broad data coverage.

Secret sauce 

S&P Global believes that it takes more than a point solution to meet its clients’ increasingly complex data workflows. The firm therefore uses a combination of proprietary data and scalable, best-of-breed technology, and a team of data experts to deliver an end-to-end managed data service.

Recent milestones

• S&P Global’s acquisition of Private Market Connect enabled the expansion of data capture capabilities across its entire fund universe and improved processing times. It has scaled processing of non-English documents to include more than 60 languages.
• Enabled Capital IQ Data Mastery for iLevel Managed Data Service clients to enrich client data with unique Capital IQ identifiers
• Launched data management-as-a-service to manage data operations on behalf of clients focusing on ESG data (including exception management and data-quality checks, etc.)

Future objectives 

• Expanding data item capture across fund financial data, as well as schedule of investment data, allowing iLevel Managed Data Service clients to draw deeper insights
• Automating the capture of deep portfolio company operating metrics to capture more detailed underlying metrics with greater accuracy and faster processing times
• Capturing and processing sustainability metrics for private funds and companies in compliance with regulatory standards to help clients meet investor and regulatory demands

Why they won

The appeal and availability of managed services in general have increased markedly over the past five years, although it is managed data services at the forefront of that trend as capital markets firms look for help around sourcing, consuming, and managing existing and new datasets with the minimum of fuss and as short a time to market as possible. S&P Global’s iLevel Managed Data Services wins its first ever Buy-Side Technology Award, thanks to the transparency, granularity and insight it delivers around private markets data. The iLevel offering is designed to help users streamline their data collection, portfolio monitoring, analytics, valuation, and reporting functions. Expect to see and hear a lot more about S&P Global Market Intelligence’s iLevel Managed Data Services in the coming months and years.