IMD & IRD Awards 2020: Best Research Provider—S&P Global Market Intelligence

S&P Global Market Intelligence is well known for its data expertise within the financial services industry, winning last year’s prestigious Overall Best Data Provider award. This year’s accolade of Best Research Provider reflects the strength of the firm’s insights and research offerings.

As Warren Breakstone, managing director and chief product officer of data management solutions, says “Research is an important part of our customer value proposition. It provides context for our underlying data, unlocking its value and delivering a richer experience for our clients.”

S&P Global Market Intelligence’s research assets include Quantamental Research, a team comprising ex-buy side analysts, PhDs and chartered financial analysts; its aftermarket research franchise, which contains more than 25 million reports from around 1,800 investment banks and independent research shops; and its proprietary industry research, which provides deep expertise and insight across such areas as climate analytics with Trucost, supply chain insights from Panjiva and emerging technologies through its recent acquisition of 451 Research.

“Our Quantamental Research team regularly generates new insights for our clients with its academic quality research and analysis, but it also acts as a research and development lab, with some of our more innovative new products emerging from the research that they develop,” says Breakstone. One such example is S&P’s Textual Data Analytics, developed and launched in 2019. This allows clients to implement a suite of 39+ sentiment scores and behavioural-based metrics directly into their analysis or to use as a benchmark.

“Our research deploys innovative, cutting-edge technologies,” Breakstone continues. “Each research piece leverages Xpressfeed, our powerful data feed solution, to leverage the full history of the datasets and uncover new insights, enabling our clients to make more informed business and investment decisions.”

In May this year, the company launched the S&P Global Marketplace, something Breakstone describes as “an important milestone for our organization. This platform brings together data, research, capabilities and solutions from all four S&P Global divisions (S&P Global Ratings, S&P Global Platts, S&P Dow Jones Indices and S&P Global Market Intelligence) for the first time. It has a modern, intuitive interface and provides clients with the opportunity to discover, evaluate and trial data from across S&P Global, alongside integrated, curated, third-party alternative data.”

This data is enhanced with solutions, including artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies from recently acquired Kensho Technologies, and visualisation tools. Research enriches the proposition further, providing comprehensive detail, such as code snippets used in the research. This allows clients to generate new ideas and replicate the analysis in their own environments. All data on the platform is delivered via Xpressfeed, application programming interfaces and newly announced cloud distribution.

As for future plans, “we’ve got a pretty robust set of enhancements, new content and new capabilities being introduced into the Marketplace platform. The recent introduction of our cloud-hosted distribution, in partnership with Snowflake, is a game changer for us and our clients that we will continue to build upon,” concludes Breakstone.

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