Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best sell-side data management product—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

The proliferation of data sources, volumes and increased complexity, as well as the extensive array of data use-cases by capital markets firms on both sides of the industry mean that efficient and effective data management is more important than ever. EDM is S&P Global’s flagship cloud-based data management platform designed to consume disparate data types from multiple sources into a central hub for curation and firm-wide access.

The solution  

EDM assimilates data from multiple sources to create transparent, traceable and validated datasets that are available across the enterprise. The platform’s over 200 global clients integrate, validate, normalize and distribute vast volumes of data leveraging S&P Global’s technology, allowing them to improve operational efficiencies and drive sustainable business growth.

Secret sauce  

Leveraging AI and data management capabilities, a range of datasets and domain expertise, S&P Global’s clients gain improved visibility across their financial, reference and static data. The firm’s data management-as-a-service offering combines its software capabilities, its ecosystem of data vendors, and the expertise of its global team. Clients can break down siloes, automate complex processes, and extract value from their data without having to commit unnecessary resources.

Recent milestones

• Leveraged AI-powered cross-referencing and classification standards to match and master entities across public and private markets data sources
• Launched ESG-as-a-service, integrated with in-house and third-party data sources to aggregate, normalize and distribute sustainability data.
• Private markets data: consolidated private markets data can be viewed side-by-side with public markets data for a complete view of a firm’s assets across markets. EDM is also integrated with S&P Globa’s iLevel portfolio monitoring solution.

Future objectives

S&P Global will continue to prioritize the delivery of streamlined, usable data and will work on embedding additional insights and functionality to make this data more valuable for decision-making.

Why they won

S&P Global’s all-conquering EDM platform, which wins the best sell-side data management product category in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, continues its phenomenal run of form. The platform’s first success in any of WatersTechnology’s awards came 18 years ago when it won the category for the best data management platform in the 2007 Buy Side Technology Awards. 

It has since gone on the dominate “its” category in these awards, the annual Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards (although not in this year’s edition), the Buy-Side Technology Awards and the Waters Rankings, and not even its change of ownership from Cadis to IHS Markit in 2012 and then a decade later to S&P Global has impacted its success. 

Key to EDM’s success is its simplicity, effectively allowing buy-side and sell-side firms to consume large volumes of increasingly complex data from a vast variety of sources in an ever-broadening array of formats so that they can make the most judicious and auditable business and investment decisions. That doesn’t sound especially challenging, but it is devilishly difficult to get right and judging by the number of firms on both sides of the industry that use the platform and its impressive clients retention rate, it is clear that it is very, very good at doing what it does.