S&P Global Market Intelligence Debuts Marketplace

S&P Global Market Intelligence, the data provider parented by S&P Global, has launched its new data platform, S&P Global Marketplace, the plans for which were first reported by WatersTechnology earlier this year.

Marketplace serves as a data “storefront” where users can browse and purchase datasets sourced from across all of S&P’s business segments: Platts, a source of benchmark price assessments for the commodities market; Ratings, one of the major credit rating agencies; and Dow Jones Indices, home to the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average; and Market Intelligence. Marketplace brings each of the four S&P Global business divisions into a single, company-wide service for the first time ever.

Through Marketplace, clients can access data documentation, sample data, data dictionaries, underlying fundamental research, interactive visualization tools and, for the first time, a suite of solutions that covers data linking, language processing and transcription, and other big data operations from Kensho Technologies, a machine learning specialist acquired by S&P in 2018. Complementary third-party alternative datasets are also available for purchase, while S&P continues to utilize its quant team to curate its own proprietary alt data.

In a demo, Warren Breakstone, chief product officer for data management solutions at Market Intelligence, showed that the platform features a grid-like setup, with different datasets displayed as boxes that users can preview and filter according to their preferences. Datasets are tagged as having been recently added or updated, while others are marked as “Coming Soon”.

“I think that’s very important—not just from a communication perspective, but from a cultural perspective—to have confidence to be able to show clients what we’re working on and be able to solicit their feedback in the process,” Breakstone says.

 At launch, 85 data and solutions options are live, and more are on the way. Examples of recently added datasets are S&P Global ESG scores, Machine Readable Filings, and real estate foot traffic via data provided by telecoms company AirSage. It will soon add a dataset from the US Food and Drug Administration. After that, it will add a dataset from Trucost, which will include information on businesses’ and sectors’ physical risks in climate change scenarios.

S&P’s quant group has scouted more than 1,000 datasets from third-party vendors and vetted them to determine which will be made available through Marketplace. To date, fewer than 20 have made the cut. The alt data in use is then structured by Market Intelligence and combined with other relevant data points using Kensho Link.

The company has made all its Covid-19 relevant datasets available via Marketplace, and linked them all together via a unique identifier with accompanying confidence scores. If an analyst or investment manager is using Marketplace to search for coronavirus-related data, they will get the results weighted by how strong the link is on a 0% to 100% scale.

As an example, a Paris-based client has set up a system in which they’ve linked some data via a chosen unique identifier. Anything that comes up above a 70% confidence threshold is directly integrated into their own system by Market Intelligence, while anything less than 70% is further worked on by its data scientists.

Soon, Market Intelligence will release its cloud-based sandbox environment to allow clients to apply their own techniques and tools to any data they choose immediately. All the data is available through S&P’s delivery channel, Xpressfeed, and its APIs.