S&P Global Introduces 10 Million Private Company Profiles to Market Intelligence

S&P Global Market Intelligence is adding 10 million private company profiles to its Market Intelligence platform. The profiles comprise European companies in major markets, primarily Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

The addition is part of S&P’s broader Small-Medium Enterprise (SME) Initiative, a multi-year strategy to provide differentiated data and insights on private companies that the data giant put into production about a year ago.

The new datasets cover basic information such as office addresses and names of company leaders, as well as financial information, compiled based on reporting registries in each country. The vendor is working with an undisclosed third party that allows it to gain quick access to newly-filed data to regional registries, after which point, S&P Global takes over to normalize and deliver the datasets, through an API or data feed, into users’ workflows so that customers can evaluate private company prospects.

The rise of private equity and the institutional demand for it have halved the number the publicly-traded companies since the 1990s, when the startup world exploded in Silicon Valley. But good, timely data on private entities can be hard for investors to come by; in response, some emerging technologies have stepped in to increase transparency and boost investor confidence. However, parsing the data you can get can still be cumbersome since reporting standards differ by geography, which impacts important factors like timeliness, completeness, and quality.

“Our customers today might go through four, five, six, seven, or eight different places to access data, and they have to clean it and standardize it,” says Marc Barrachin, head of new product development at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “How do we take a lot of that work out and provide to our customers not just SME [datasets], but also, how can [they] compare a fintech that [they] want to invest in versus a large public [entity] or versus a smaller private company? That comparability is very, very important from the client standpoint.”

Barrachin says Market Intelligence expects to extend its private-company coverage to the US and Canada very soon, with regions in Asia, Russia, Africa and the Middle East to follow. The datasets will also soon be added to its newly-launched Marketplace data platform.

The Market Intelligence division is also working to identify mechanisms to provide information that is not available through registries, or that isn’t available via a registry quickly, such as mergers, acquisitions, or other relevant news—essentially, alternative data for private companies. It will be a large undertaking that involves web scraping and monitoring local newspapers, tagging and linking events to entities, determining sentiment, then classifying events as positive, negative or neutral.

“It’s a massive exercise in our natural language processing and machine-learning techniques,” Barrachin says.

[Correction: In the original version of this story, it said the added datasets of 10 million private European companies brought S&P Global Market Intelligence’s total SME coverage up to about 37 million companies, as per an S&P spokesperson. However, the company reached back out after publication, and said that the total number is “fluid,” and therefore cannot be quantified accurately.]