A Private Equity Firm Leverages Technology to Optimize Data Management and Analysis

Private equity (PE) dealmakers are in the midst of a perfect storm. Firms not only face increasingly fierce competition for targets, but also unprecedented levels of macroeconomic uncertainty. The ability to act with speed and certainty in this volatile environment is of utmost importance. To do this, PE firms are increasingly tapping into big data and analytics to test their investment theses, gain insights and execute deals at pace.

According to a survey by S&P Global Market Intelligence, PE has reached a new stage of maturity with the sharpened aim of leveraging data and technology to create an edge in deal sourcing and due diligence. The findings showed that PE firms are set to explore insights from a broader range of data sources, as private asset data opens a larger universe of information from which to identify opportunities. They are also looking to use technology to make sense of increasingly unstructured datasets that were previously inaccessible.

This European PE firm recognized the need to embrace data-driven processes to keep up with market trends and stay ahead of its peers as competition for dealflow intensifies. The executive team wanted to accelerate the firm's digitization strategy and invest in more sophisticated tools to source and manage data. This would automate workflows and enable the investment professionals to identify and seize opportunities more quickly.

Pain Points

Many of the firm's processes around accessing new data to source leads and conduct due diligence and valuations were manual, duplicative, costly and extremely time consuming. Investment professionals were facing challenges with:

• Ingesting, validating and standardizing data coming from multiple sources.
• Sifting through datasets to Identify the relevant datapoints that could uncover unique opportunities.
• Centralizing and managing data in an efficient and cost-effective way, while avoiding the need to establish and maintain an in-house data warehouse
• Testing new datasets before subscribing to ensure that the information trulyadded value.
• Knowing where to start in modernizing and streamlining processes.
  
  The firm reached out to S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") to learn more about its offering.

The Solution

Market Intelligence specialists knew they could assist the firm with its digitization strategy, considering the benefits of using the cloud versus on-premises technology infrastructure. They discussed S&P Global's collaboration with cloud provider Snowflake to launch S&P Global via Snowflake, a fully managed cloud solution that meets the changing demand for data delivery by eliminating the data ingestion process.

The specialists then described how users can review available datasets and solutions via the S&P Global Marketplace, which serves as the single data catalogue across S&P Global and select third-party providers. The datasets that appeal can then be tested via S&P Global Marketplace Workbench prior to subscribing. Workbench is a cutting-edge technology that enables users to explore and experiment with datasets from S&P Global and curated third-party providers in a scalable and secure cloud-based environment, with no installation required.

Together, these capabilities would enable investment professionals at the PE firm to:

	Leverage unique, differentiated data	Private Company Data covers 12 million private companies around the globe with financial statements.[2] Preqin Alternative Asset Fund Performance Data provides data and analytics on fundraising, dry powder, fund performance and fund benchmarks across the alternative assets industry. Premium Financials Data provides standardized data for 5,000+ financial, supplemental and industry-specific data items for 150,000+ companies globally, including 95,000+ active and inactive companies across multiple industries. Data is available at numerous frequencies and points-in-time. Estimates Data provides standardized, global, real-time financial forecasting measures, such as upgrades/downgrades, target price revisions and market-moving news. It includes estimates based on projections, models, analysis and research from analysts, brokers and companies themselves. Transactions Data provides profiles of approximately 2 million deals captured across the globe. This includes M&A, private placement, venture capital, PIPE, spin-off, bankruptcy, share buyback and equity/debt public offerings. Professionals Data includes 3.2+ million profiles with biographies, contact data, education, compensation, affiliations and corporate board memberships, each linked to a unique person ID. Money Market Directories Data includes in-depth contact and investment details on 300,000+ global institutional investors, 780+ consultants and 26,000+ investment managers.
	Gain efficient cloud-based access	Snowflake’s Cloud Data Platform is a Software as a Service (SaaS), so there is no hardware or software to select, install and manage. Accessing data from S&P Global and other providers via Snowflake enables users to obtain live, ready-to-query datasets that are always up-to-date and do not require transformation before using. This enables users to join external and internal data for faster and better business decisions. In addition, Snowflake is cloud agnostic enabling users to leverage the provider of choice, whether Amazon Web Services, Microsoft AZURE or Google Cloud Platform.
	Explore and test data	Workbench provides access to the datasets needed to perform exploratory analysis or build models. Users can easily analyze and review 65+ pre-built notebooks by Market Intelligence data experts and data scientists or build their own to better understand and see first-hand the value of various datasets. Users can also create tables, charts, dashboards, animations and more to see correlations and capture the power of the data. The environment enables teams to collaborate across notebooks in their company's own secure and scalable workspace. Users can share notebooks and work with colleagues through real-time co-authoring and commenting to enable streamlined teamwork while maintaining control.
	Connect the dots across datasets	The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) includes the current classification for active companies in 120+ countries and provides 47,000+ company classifications and covers 61,000+ global securities. Cross Reference Services seamlessly links reference data by company, security and industry.

Key Benefits

The PE firm and its investment professionals saw many benefits to the Market Intelligence offerings, namely how they could accelerate the firm's digital transformation strategy to manage large amounts of data more effectively and analyze relevant data more efficiently. The firm subscribed to S&P Global on Snowflake and S&P Global Marketplace Workbench and the investment professionals are now able to:

• Leverage a scalable, secure and cost-effective cloud environment.
• Gain instant access to ready-to-query data without the need to search, extract and transform information.
• See a broader picture of potential opportunities by bringing together a wide array of data that is already linked and structured to create rich stories with a 360⁰ perspective.
• Experiment with selected datasets before subscribing to see how they work together to uncover new, important insights.

Click here to explore some of the datasets mentioned in this Case Study.

Click here to explore S&P Global via Snowflake.

Click here to explore S&P Global Marketplace Workbench.

[1] This was a survey of 30 senior executives from U.S. PE firms with at least U.S. $2bn in assets under management (AUM) conducted by Mergermarket on behalf of S&P Global Market

[2] All data as of December 2022.