BST Awards 2024: Best buy-side managed data service—S&P Global Market Intelligence

Overview

iLEVEL Managed Data Services centralizes private investments data about clients’ portfolios using AI and subject matter expert review. It specializes in processing financial and operational reporting from fund managers, portfolio companies and borrowers.

The solution  

iLEVEL Managed Data Services manages the end-to-end private markets data workflow into the following components: source document collection; data extraction; data review; standardization; exception management; and service delivery. The service leverages AI technology at each step of the process and complementary subject matter expertise, resulting in faster and more accurate data processing and increased data coverage.

Secret sauce  

S&P Global sees its combination of proprietary data and scale, best-of-breed technology, use of AI, and team of data experts that combined deliver an end-to-end managed data service as the keys to its competitive differentiation.

Recent milestones

• Enhanced data extraction across fund holdings, capturing data points like Ebitda, revenue and net debt from all available sources
• Started collecting fund performance and financial details across the fund universe (over 10,000 funds)
• Released automated data ingestion (ADI) in iLEVEL, allowing users to capture bespoke data in parallel to data services collection
• Launched separate complementary data management as a service to manage data operations on behalf of clients, managing entity, ESG and reference data

Future objectives

S&P Global Market Intelligence plans to:

• Expand data item capture across schedule of investment data down to security level detail
• Enhance the capture of asset class-specific data for real estate, private credit and natural resources
• Increase total of sustainability metrics for private funds and companies in compliance with regulatory standards to help clients meet investor and regulatory demands

Why they won

S&P Global follows up its success in last year’s BST Awards by winning the best buy-side managed data service category again, thanks to its iLEVEL Managed Data Services offering. It seems that everywhere you look these days across the capital markets technology landscape, managed services are proliferating. And for good reason: Buy-side firms are especially focused on managing their fixed operating costs while simultaneously enhancing the functionality, operational efficiency and robustness of their tech and data stacks. 

We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that the managed service model is not just one of the ways to deliver tech and data to financial services firms; at some point, managed services will be the only way vendors do it. The differentiator then is no longer about the delivery mechanism but about the quality of the data or technology on offer. This is S&P Global’s bread and butter with its iLevel Managed Data Services, delivering transparency, granularity and insight around private markets data, which still presents buy-side firms with significant challenges due to poor data quality, a lack of standardization, and opacity. S&P Global’s iLevel offering is designed specifically to help buy-side address these challenges.