Asia Awards 2023: Best reference data provider—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

Financial institutions are required to price their assets, liabilities, and more esoteric measures like their notional exposure to derivatives and various collateral- and counterparty-related risk numbers accurately, transparently, and credibly. These calculations are fundamental as they determine everything from a firm’s profitability to whether it has posted enough collateral to support its trades. S&P Global delivers high-quality, independent pricing data across fixed-income and derivative asset classes allowing user firms to make informed, defendable, and repeatable trading, valuations and risk management decisions.

The solution

S&P Global’s mix of data, technology and human support allows firms to make judicious decisions across valuations, risk management, investments, trading, and reporting. Following IHS Markit’s merger with S&P Global in February 2022, the integration of IHS Markit data and its data lake with S&P Global offerings enables clients to explore fundamentals and alternative datasets via desktop, cloud, datafeed, and APIs, along with expert analysis and in-region human support.

Secret sauce

S&P Global’s offerings are designed around clients’ specific needs. Traders, portfolio managers, compliance officers and risk managers within banks, asset management firms and other capital markets entities have different data requirement to manage these functions across the enterprise. The firm’s flexible delivery strategy is designed around clients’ needs and is supported by an extensive list of integration partners, making it easier for firms to consume, manage, share, and store data throughout the organization.

Future objectives

• Intensify the integration of S&P and IHS: S&P Global sees ample opportunities for more synergy as it further integrates the firms’ resources to create new products and services.
• Revamping bond pricing: S&P Global will add enhanced analytics and ESG data to offer better pricing, supported by expert insights. 
• Technology: Clients require customizable and scalable solutions to help them implement bespoke strategies and meet evolving compliance requirements.

Why they won

S&P Global wins its second category of this year’s WatersTechnology Asia Awards on the back of its Pricing and Reference Data service providing user firms with a one-stop shop for all their pricing/valuation, risk and regulatory compliance needs. Key to S&P Global’s success in this intensely competitive area of the capital markets is the accuracy and transparency of its pricing and reference data, supported by a large number of subject matter experts across all regions, on hand to help users with their price challenges and any other queries they might have.