S&P Capital IQ has struck again, continuing its buying spree with the purchase of London-based Credit Market Analysis Ltd., the valuations data subsidiary of CME Group. The acquisition plugs a gap in S&P Capital IQ’s valuations coverage, which will now include CMA’s speciality areas of structured finance and over-the-counter derivatives pricing. S&P Capital IQ’s traditional strengths have been in US Government Bonds and Municipal Bonds, as evidenced by its top ranking for those categories in A-Team’s Performance Benchmarking 2011: Valuations in North American Buy-Side Institutions.
Just as significantly, it bolsters S&P Capital IQ’s European valuations offerings, giving it stronger European coverage, as well as local clients and valuations expertise. And it provides the underlying technology to enable it to shift into intra-day quotes on OTC instruments.
According to Lou Eccleston, president of S&P Capital IQ, “Thousands of financial institutions around the world rely daily on CMA’s data and technology to provide them with clear, reliable pricing and related OTC information. This acquisition significantly expands S&P Capital IQ’s asset-class coverage for data and pricing and adds the technology to move into intraday quotes on derivative and other OTC securities.”
CMA’s clients range from some of the largest investment banks and asset managers in the world, to boutique hedge funds and risk management firms. CMA will be integrated into S&P Capital IQ’s existing pricing and data businesses, considerably broadening the firm’s asset class coverage.
CMA’s acquisition continues a series of purchases by S&P Capital IQ that most recently includes risk analytics specialist R2 Financial Technologies and low-latency data provider QuantHouse. The CMA deal is part of a wider one that created a new joint venture – S&P Dow Jones Indices – in the index data business, bringing together the key S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average benchmarks.
The purchase of CMA, along with the recently announced acquisitions of Toronto-based R2 Financial Technologies and Paris-based QuantHouse, provides S&P Capital IQ with the components necessary to offer its clients broad market data and risk analytics platforms in the industry.
