Responsible Products and Marketing

We continually seek new ways to deliver value and provide a positive experience for our customers. From ideation, prototyping and testing through launch, marketing and delivery, we strive to deliver products that exceed expectations through quality-focused, risk-informed protocols. Throughout, we prioritize our responsibility to customers and their needs and preferences.

S&P Global follows protocols to develop responsible, accurate, relevant and high-quality products. Any new product must have review and signoff from risk, legal, compliance, marketing and, in some instances, finance to confirm that all quality standards are met and any issues identified during development-phase risk assessments are addressed. We also have mechanisms for receiving and investigating complaints about our products and implementing corrective action plans.

To maintain strong risk-management governance and controls for our products, several business units or divisions have product development governance processes.

S&P Global Ratings, for instance, employs various first-, second- and third-line functions, as appropriate, to oversee the establishment, maintenance and enforcement of policies, procedures and methodologies for determining credit ratings and non-credit rating products. Through its New and Materially Changed Product Approval (NPA) Process, S&P Global Market Intelligence aims to ensure operational, legal, financial, compliance and other factors, as well as enterprise risks, are addressed prior to launch. At S&P Global Commodity Insights, commercial and editorial functions are managed separately, to ensure benchmarks are produced independently, transparently and free from any commercial influence. Index committees at S&P Dow Jones Indices support efforts for all indices to be appropriately developed, defined and structured, and regularly reviewed for compliance with our public methodologies as market conditions change. Likewise, S&P Global Mobility ensures product integrity through robust product governance. And S&P Global Sustainable1 uses a principle-based approach with policies and guidelines for governing the methodology and modeling underlying many of its product and service offerings (see box titled S&P Global Sustainable1 Builds on Methodology and Modeling Governance).

Our business depends on our clients’ trust. We maintain processes and policies to enable us to align marketing materials with responsible practices, legal requirements and customer expectations.

Safeguarding customers’ trust starts with protecting their privacy. See our Global Corporate Privacy Policy for details. We employ responsible sales and marketing practices in communicating the value of our products and services, including complying with transparency rules.

We believe a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is essential for our business to thrive, and we embed it in our marketing practices. In 2023, our in-house agency, The 199, updated S&P Global brand guidelines to include more diversity in both our written and visual content.

We have dedicated policies to enable us to meet and adhere to the highest standards. For instance, our Social Media Policy(opens in a new tab) prohibits our team members from taking any action that might suggest that the independence and objectivity of our products or services could be improperly influenced by our sales, marketing or other commercial interests. Failure to comply with our policies may lead to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment.