Following the launch of a raft of new services earlier this year, Standard & Poor’s Fixed Income Risk Management Services (FIRMS) has added another to its portfolio in the form of a new enterprise level data feed solution. The Global Data Solutions offering purports to provide users with a range of data and analytics to allow them to evaluate and monitor the financial instruments in their portfolios, according to Jonathan Reeve, managing director at the vendor.
The analytics and research unit, which is separate from S&P’s ratings business and is headed by ex-Thomson Financial and Bloomberg heavyweight Lou Ecclestone, has been all guns blazing this year in order to garner a greater share of the data solutions market. This new offering is an extension of its ambitions in the space and aims to respond to market pressures by providing a service that addresses the requirement for a more robust cross asset approach to assessing risk and value in investor portfolios.
“We developed Global Data Solutions to help investors keep up with the rapidly increasing demands of the financial marketplace, including analytical and risk management, regulation, and pre to post-trade operations,” says Reeve.
To this end, the new solution encompasses the full scope of S&P’s market offering, from credit ratings and ratings research to equity corporate actions to structured finance performance data. Global Data Solutions combines market data from across Standard & Poor’s investment, credit and risk evaluation research units. Users of the service therefore have single source access to: the vendor’s credit ratings and ratings research; cross reference services and security master; ownership hierarchies; fixed income terms and conditions; bond notification services; equity corporate actions; US residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) pool and loan level performance data; synthetic collateralised debt obligation (CDO) reference obligor data; and S&P proprietary analytics.
“Access to its specialised content, including Standard & Poor’s exclusive data sets, is available through customisable and portfolio style data packages as well as a variety of delivery formats including APIs,” explains Rui Carvalho, managing director of Global Data Solutions.
Included in the customisable data feed is the US RMBS Edition, which provides individual loan level data on the underlying collateral in mortgage and asset backed securities. The RMBS data feed is based on the universe of Standard & Poor’s credit rated US RMBS deals; which includes subprime, Alt-A, prime jumbo and additional collateral types.
The vendor is evidently keen to provide the end user with as much access to its various service offerings as possible. A number of other vendors have also gone down this route this year, in terms of gaining more traction with users by easing access to the vendor’s full range of data sets and services.
Earlier this year, the FIRMS division also launched a new RatingsDirect Global Credit Portal and added a valuations service for structured assets and complex securities to its portfolio. The RatingsDirect portal upgrade included expanded content and added market views in order to integrate more seamlessly into the workflow of market participants, Philipa Stoneham, product manager of the RatingsDirect service, explained to Reference Data Review at the time.
