S&P Global’s EDM platform continues its evolutionary course

S&P Global Market Intelligence won the Best buy-side data management product category at the Buy-Side Technology Awards 2023 thanks to its successful enterprise data management (EDM) offering. Neslihan Yegul, Emea head of commercial strategy for software solutions at S&P Global, discusses EDM’s ongoing evolution, the firm’s merger with IHS Markit and how EDM is helping clients address environmental, social and governance (ESG) and private markets data management challenges.
 

Beginning the conversation with S&P Global’s February 2022 merger with IHS Markit, what did this mean for EDM customers?  

Neslihan Yegul: The merger certainly created some excitement among the EDM client community—the opportunities for leveraging S&P Global datasets were clear from day one. EDM clients can now access S&P Global’s marketplace via Snowflake and seamlessly load any datasets to which they are subscribed into EDM, and combine them with other in-house datasets for normalization and distribution. But, having seamless access to data is only part of the story: as S&P Global, we can now provide deeper subject matter expertise, which can be key for solving complex challenges, such as those concerning ESG. Our Sustainable1 division is a great example of this. The data and analytics, combined with our proven technology—and backed up with deep expertise globally—is what makes our proposition so unique.
 

ESG is a major focus for the buy side right now. Where are firms on their ESG journeys, and how is S&P Global helping them address the associated data management challenges?   

Neslihan Yegul: Every client is at a slightly different stage of their journey. When we discuss the challenges they are experiencing, clients usually highlight three or four key areas. They mention missing data, collecting data or the accessibility of data, and have different challenges in each of those areas. With our ESG data management-as-a-service offering, our clients can easily onboard, align and maintain frequently used ESG data vendors using our out-of-the-box connectors and adapters, including access to our own Sustainable1/Trucost data. What makes the service so appealing is that it allows great flexibility. Clients can opt to receive full datasets or subscribe to a universe-of-interest model. We then provide the usual exception management with data quality checks based on clients’ workflows and business rules.

We also help our clients solve very ESG-specific challenges using EDM, such as mapping data to the entity universe they have across public and private markets. We can manage their entity hierarchies in a flexible manner and, if they wish, clients can supplement it with our cross-reference data.

In addition to that, we have adapted our data management workflows for ESG to focus specifically on front-office users. We can now provide improved portfolio monitoring for ESG—they can leverage EDM and apply early-stage screening for activities they might consider controversial. We’re trying to provide a framework to encourage qualitative research that is repeatable and consistent—the bread and butter for EDM.

Finally, we are helping clients meet various regulatory requirements—such as the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and those connected to the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures—by helping them collect and prepare the necessary data.
 

Private markets are particularly topical across the industry—the buy side in particular. What data management challenges do firms face as they increase exposure to private assets, and how is S&P Global helping them?  

Neslihan Yegul: It’s an exciting area for us—not only in EDM, but overall for S&P Global—given the range of data, software solutions and services we provide to limited and general partners.

In relation to data management specifically, some of our existing clients have already begun to leverage EDM to bring their private and public markets data together at the entity and fund level. However, the increasing importance of ESG has extended to mapping that data across entities for both asset classes. We have extensive private markets data in Capital IQ—I believe we have more than 90 million private companies in the Cap IQ platform. This, combined with our in-house artificial intelligence tools, helps clients improve success and confidence levels with the mapping of private markets data, which is key.

The second aspect is the expansion of datasets used by our general partners. These firms are now not only consuming more data, but consuming data from an increasing number of sources to support decision-making. This creates the data management challenges we are now used to but, in addition, there are also some specific private asset challenges, such as the lack of unified IDs. Combined with our iLEVEL Managed Data Services, EDM has become a powerful tool for clients to effectively manage this influx of new information. This is something we will be building on throughout 2024. 

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