Expand Your Perspective Innovation

When it comes to business and today’s complex economies, supply chains, and volatile markets, innovation is critical to success.

In this three-part Q&A series, leaders from the combined organization of S&P Global and IHS Markit explain our three pillars: Innovation, Partnership, and Intelligence. First in this series is Innovation.

How do you think of innovation and why is it important to S&P Global and our customers?

Warren Breakstone - Desktop & Channel Distribution: Innovation helps our clients get ahead of the curve and capitalize on new ideas. The power of innovation at S&P Global across areas such as applied AI, machine learning, and data science helps us to support our clients with their financial decision-making. With a unique combination of leading-edge technology, comprehensive data along with a keen eye toward our ever-changing markets, this allows us to better serve our clients in a more relevant and tailored way.

Mark Findlay - Financial Risk Analytics: We continue to rapidly innovate, working closely with our customers to introduce new risk measures, modeling techniques, machine learning for performance and scale as we head towards real-time risk and advanced scenario analysis capabilities.

Ed Chidsey - Data, Valuations & Analytics: Innovation is at the heart of what we do and it really starts with a focus on the customer. We have to be outward-looking. We have to engage our customers at design to understand what needs they have: what's emerging from a market structure perspective, from a regulatory perspective, or gaps that they have in the way they operate their business. So, innovation is key. Engaging with customers is key. And that's going to drive our product development processes and where we invest in new initiatives to deliver more for our customers on a go-forward basis.

Justine Iverson – Channels & Platforms: As I think about how we partner with clients to drive innovation, one of the main things we're seeing is that more data isn't always the better solution. So, what we do is we make our data easier to use and of higher quality. We link it with other data sets and we make it available via delivery channels and tools such as the Data Lake or Workbench that allow them to get started on their objectives quickly, whether that be discovering alpha and a new investment strategy or making a really tough business decision. These tools and analytics, leveraging some of our partnerships such as that with Snowflake or Databricks, allow our clients to innovate faster.

Whit McGraw - Credit & Risk Solutions: New innovative solutions are in high demand, but we also work alongside our clients to help solve some of their biggest challenges. This mindset is central to who we are as a company. For example, we’ve responded to recent market volatility with solutions to analyze the financial stability and risk of a privately held company. We’ve also had a keen focus on ESG, one example being the innovative solutions we’ve built for bank operators to evaluate the impact of climate change scenarios on their portfolios.

Joanna Reis - Credit & Risk Product Specialists: Innovative thinking will be especially important with our recent merger as S&P Global and IHS Markit bring together complementary products. For example, we now have credit ratings and fixed income pricing, risk models and risk workflow capabilities. Many opportunities lie ahead to work with clients to harness our collective creativity.