S&P Global Market Intelligence
Driving Financial Decisions through Smart Data

The investment banking sector has been going through a rough patch. Industry revenues have been flat from a decade ago at $250 billion, while return on equity (ROE)—a key measure of profitability— has decreased from 19.5 to under 9 percent over that time. Investment banks are challenged by the new non-bank entrants into an already competitive market. These developments call for greater focus on redefining core business models. Meanwhile, evolving regulations and rampant growth of new technologies such as blockchain and a cultural shift toward data-driven decision making is further reshaping the contours in the industry. Investment banks require trusted technology partners to help them automate processes and leverage advanced analytics to gain better control over the business.

Set against this backdrop is S&P Global Market Intelligence, a company that combines broad data, powerful analytics, and deep industry intelligence to give investment bankers key insights on the companies and markets they follow. “We aim to extend our capabilities through our Market Intelligence platform,” says Warren Breakstone, Managing Director, S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The Market Intelligence platform collects, interprets, analyzes, and connects large amounts of financial and industry data from S&P Capital IQ and SNL Financial and turns it into actionable intelligence to help clients make business and financial decisions.”

The web-based Market Intelligence platform integrates with Office add-ins and mobile devices that help investment bankers uncover opportunities, stay informed and communicate with clients and prospects seamlessly. Through an intuitive, modern interface, investment banking clients can have full transparency across the asset level data, news and industry dynamics, enabling them to track performance, identify investment ideas, perform valuations, and assess future credit risks. The financial data sets available via the firm’s web-based Market Intelligence platform are also made accessible via API and XpressfeedTM delivery for the investment banks, enabling them to spend less time gathering data and more time on making effective business decisions.

Breakstone notes that clients, from both buy- and sell-side, require greater transparency in how their decisions impact performance. On the buy-side, with the shift from active to passive investing, active investment managers are facing new pressure to justify their higher fees and benchmark performance. Seeking new ways to demonstrate outperformance has led to an unquenchable thirst for new sources of structured and unstructured data or sometimes called alternative data that might give the man edge in their investment management processes. S&P Global Market Intelligence’s dedicated experts employ a wide variety of data science tools and techniques to structure, tag, and cross reference their own proprietary content with other data sets, enabling users to perform deep quantitative industry analysis via machines.

S&P Global Market Intelligence continues to invest to advance their proprietary content sets and delivery channels. The firm continues to add many interesting and often unique products to their XpressfeedTM delivery platform, which allows for easy ingestion of unstructured and structured data into a client’s database or front-end application, enabling them to identify new relationships and alpha generating ideas. For example, S&P Global Market Intelligence has recently converted the market’s largest universe of corporate transcripts sourced from earnings calls, M&A calls and industry conferences for over 8,000 active companies globally into a machine readable format. Users can receive real time updates of live transcribed calls, with the metadata tags and unique identifier to every speaker for quantifying the sentiment of earnings calls.

The firm has also introduced a sophisticated Portfolio Analytics tool to assist portfolio managers in investment decisions process. Breakstone notes that the tool is integrated with S&P Global Market Intelligence’s proprietary Alpha Factor Library to allow portfolio managers to uncover unique insights and communicate their portfolio performance and characteristics in the context of 550 style factors within well-known investment styles such as value, growth and quality. This uniquely allows managers to show their clients, in a visually appealing way, how they are differentiated from cheaper, passive or Smart Beta solutions. The web-based tool also provides them with an extensive report library and flexible reporting tools, which are actively used to provide transparency and showcase results–relative to both standard and alternative benchmarks. Forging ahead, the firm focuses on automating the portfolio ingestion process and expanding reporting capabilities.