BST Awards 2025: Best buy-side CRM (customer relationship management) platform—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

S&P Global Market Intelligence for Salesforce (SPGMI for Salesforce) is designed to support buy-side firms’ customer relationship management (CRM) workflows by streamlining prospecting, enhancing client news tracking and clarifying corporate relationships. It addresses the widespread issues of disorganized, “messy” CRM data, duplicate accounts, limited visibility into portfolio or firm exposure, and the administrative burden of CRM management. SPGMI for Salesforce is an essential tool for buy-side firms, given the importance of rapid decision-making and accurate forecasting.

The solution  

SPGMI for Salesforce offers buy-side users a CRM enriched with S&P Global data that supports informed decision-making. Financials, market data and corporate relationships provide a clear picture of exposure and areas for growth. Firmographic and key developments provide material news and events such as bankruptcy announcements, M&A rumors and executive changes to uncover investment or risk opportunities, while the addition of key contacts enhances outreach to decision-makers and builds contact networks within the CRM.

Secret sauce  

SPGMI for Salesforce connects to over 30 million companies and 9 million public and private funds. It is updated daily and offers functionality allowing users to search, identify and link records. Buy-side firms can unlock additional insights by using CIQ Entity IDs to link to other datasets, including Visible Alpha Estimates, AI-ready transcripts/filings, and holdings and transactions data. Custom data mapping allows CRM administrators to configure data to key fields without overwriting content, enabling reporting, interaction with Salesforce’s Agentforce application, and workflow management.

Recent milestones

S&P Global recently:

• Released a full ‘Lightning’ version of components, improving performance for data search and linking, as well as optimized display for screen resolution
• Integrated market data, including pricing and trade information, as well as market capitalization incorporated in the company firmographic display and search parameters
• Released ‘custom field mapping’ which allows administrators to point data updates to custom fields, bypass updates, and set enrichment schedules to daily, weekly, monthly or yearly

Future objectives

S&P Global plans to:

• Add a GenAI agent to surface document insights from earnings call transcripts and company filling documents; users will be able to generate follow-on tasks (send emails, adjust renewal forecasts, etc.) from the agent document insights
• Update corporate hierarchy display to allow portfolio and investment views, in addition to corporate structures
• Add rounds of funding data to demonstrate growth and transaction history for private companies, including linking to businesses associated with transactions

Why they won

S&P Global’s win in the best buy-side CRM platform category of this year’s BST Awards is thanks to its impressive SPGMI for Salesforce offering, a service designed to transform buy-side firms’ CRM functions by integrating S&P Global’s data directly into Salesforce. SPGMI for Salesforce is designed to address one of the buy side’s most persistent challenges—fragmented, incomplete and outdated CRM-related information—by delivering users with a unified view of companies, funds and relationships enriched with financials, market data and corporate developments. 

This helps buy-side personnel make faster, more informed and more defendable data-driven decisions while reducing their administrative workload and the potential for errors compared with spreadsheet-based functions. Recent enhancements to the service, including Lightning-optimized components, integrated market data and flexible custom field mapping, have enhanced its usability, while its breadth of coverage—over 30 million companies and 9 million funds—combined with CIQ Entity IDs data makes it a potentially transformational platform for buy-side firms’ client engagement, opportunity discovery and risk analysis functions.

S&P Global won three additional categories in this year’s BST Awards, underlining its impressive versatility across the buy side: best private markets data provider, best buy-side corporate actions platform and best overall technology provider for 2025.