BST Awards 2019: Best Buy-Side Data Management Provider—IHS Markit

When it comes to data management, consistency is as important as accuracy. And you don’t get much more consistent than winning a category eight years in a row, as IHS Markit has. But consistency doesn’t mean that the vendor is becoming complacent.

Over the past 12 months, IHS Markit has rolled out three key enhancements to its Markit EDM platform, including standardizing some of its core entity models and interfaces to accelerate implementation times for clients, and “packaging up” capabilities so that clients can start using them more quickly; modernizing its user interface and applications to provide a richer client experience; and expanding the platform to support other datasets, including energy and alternative data.

As increased investment in alternative assets in the search for higher returns drives greater adoption of alternative datasets that don’t traditionally exist in data models and aren’t traditionally supported by data management platforms, Andrew Eisen, global head of EDM at IHS Markit, says he expects to incorporate more alternative datasets—automotive and maritime datasets, for example—into the firm’s EDM platform, where the data can be mapped to issuers and obligations to provide a more holistic view of data.

In addition, IHS Markit continues to modernize the platform in other ways, including moving to a cloud-native architecture, rather than just using the cloud to offer managed services. Using software built specifically to run in the cloud enables clients to do things cheaper and faster, and to immediately take advantage of new features from cloud operators.

Eisen notes a shift from firms focusing solely on compliance and cost-related projects to focusing on data management as a growth enabler. “Buy-side and sell-side clients alike are exploring ways to remain relevant to clients…and it all comes back to ‘How can we do more with our data?’ So data quality—and being able to trust your data—is a keystone to being able to provide more insight and value to clients and their customers,” he says.