Can anyone compete with S&P?

by Matt Ober, General Partner at Social Leverage

S&P = Markit + IHS. Does someone make a move to compete? S&P is a data & information services powerhouse and has no competition.

S&P acquired Markit which acquired IHS. They have also acquired dozens and dozens of other valuable data assets. They have great sales and customer support. They have products for numerous industries and are constantly investing in technology.

They dominate in the ratings business. They have some of the most widely recognized indices. They are the market standard for CDS Data (CDX Indices). They are the market standard for daily short-interest data (Dataexplorers acquisition). They own Plattsn, which is an industry leader in commodities data including oil and gas, metals, energy, freight, and more. They even own CarFax! Show me the Carfax!

They are constantly acquiring and investing in companies that add valuable data assets, content, or products to their offering (for example ChartIQ). Their acquisition of SNL many years ago combined with their CapIQ product makes them a dominant force when it comes to fundamental data for financial markets.

Who could possibly compete with them? Will Factset expand outside financial services and make a run at S&P? Maybe when Bloomberg is eventually sold it will look to expand. They have tried in the past with Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Bloomberg Government, but they have never really gone as big as S&P. What about Nasdaq? Will Verisk make a run at them? What about someone like Snowflake?

What other assets are out there to buy to make S&P stronger or for an acquirer to think about? S&P doesn’t own an expert network. Maybe they buy GLG and compete with Tegus on the transcript library. Maybe they buy Tegus? What about AlphaSense? I am sure there are other verticals for data that they would love to expand into. Maybe it’s healthcare. Maybe they acquire some large events/conferences that they use to further sell their data assets.

Lots to learn from some savvy acquisitions, strong culture, and strong products that S&P has built and maintained over the years. I would love to see some competition. Some Rollups! Someone take a real run at acquiring data assets privately and then going public. Now is as good a time as ever!