Asia Awards 2025: Best evaluated pricing data provider—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

S&P Global Market Intelligence (S&P Global) prices fixed-income instruments that are traded over the counter (OTC). With local expertise and access to up-to-date trade and indicative levels, S&P Global provides pricing transparency on over 2.9 million corporate, money market, municipal, securitized, and sovereign bonds. In the ever-evolving regulatory and accounting environment, investors’ need for increased transparency continues to drive demand for high-quality independent bond data for use in price discovery, valuations and risk management processes.

The solution  

S&P Global’s evaluated bond pricing service uses inputs from multiple sources to create evaluated levels with expertise from its global evaluation staff. It provides intraday and end-of-day pricing to meet the needs of fixed-income market participants, while its analytics and transparency data provide clients with greater transparency into its prices. S&P Global provides users with detailed methodology documents, back-testing reports, challenge statistics, and other relevant documentation to meet compliance requirements, including SEC Rule 2a-5 for fair value determination.

Secret sauce  

• S&P Global’s data cleaning processes use machine-learning thresholds on historical data, while its alternative data can be sourced in multiple formats.
• The firm offers clients multiple delivery options of its various datasets while keeping solutions scalable and flexible. Clients can choose their preferred model without having to invest in additional delivery mechanisms.
• S&P Global offers datasets that allow users to respond to regulatory mandates, issuer/sector spread curves to monitor risk, and datasets that help valuation teams manage workflows.

Recent milestones

S&P Global:

• Aggregated daily pricing information into systematic curves to help clients with risk management functions
• Added 250 new fields to analytics for corporate and sovereign bonds and built a suite of analytics on securitized products
• Enhanced data delivery to offer clients pricing data in under 10 minutes from the time of the snapshot
• Expanded coverage on a number of priced instruments

Future objectives

S&P Global will:

• Continue to increase the universe of bonds it prices
• Migrate its pricing infrastructure to the cloud to better service customers
• Integrate its data with multiple delivery platforms, including its Capital IQ Pro desktop
• Continue to invest to improve the quality of its pricing

Why they won

S&P Global Market Intelligence wins the best evaluated pricing data provider category in the WatersTechnology Asia Awards thanks to its outstanding evaluated bond pricing service. The offering provides clients with reliable, high-quality prices covering an extensive range of OTC fixed-income instruments, including more than 2.9 million corporate, money market, municipal, securitized, and sovereign bonds. 

Producing accurate and transparent valuations and prices is a challenge for all market participants and their service providers, even when the assets they are looking to price are traded regularly and reliable market data is relatively easy to come by. This challenge is exacerbated when it comes to thinly traded fixed-income securities such as corporate bonds, for which market data is patchy at best or altogether absent. This is where S&P Global excels, thanks to its broad instrument coverage, the sheer size of the organization and the resources it has at its disposal to address clients’ various needs, and its deep domain experience and industry track record as one of the go-to providers of data, technology and ancillary services.