An Asset Manager Meets Client Redistribution Demands for Excel-based Statements

Many institutional asset managers are fielding requests from their clients for increased transparency into their holdings with reporting that includes risk statistics to guarantee that mandates are being met or exceeded. This increased level of reporting often requires delivery of data in a format that enables details to be easily extracted and manipulated, such as delivery in Excel files or as comma-separated values (CSV). S&P Global Market Intelligence's ("Market Intelligence") feed solutions for S&P Global Ratings credit ratings offer reliable and flexible delivery of one of the industry’s largest databases of current and historical credit ratings across corporate, sovereign, U.S. public finance and structured asset classes.

This large U.S.-based institutional asset manager has been steadily increasing its fixed income assets under management and research desk capabilities. Its client base primarily includes insurance companies, endowments, pension funds and corporations looking to invest in income-driven funds that meet the risk thresholds of their businesses. These clients started to request statements containing S&P Global Ratings’ credit ratings that can be easily manipulated, which prompted the fixed income team to contact Market Intelligence to inquire about licensing data distribution in an Excel format.

Pain Points

This asset manager was feeling a sense of urgency to service its client’s reporting requirements with manipulable formats and flexible data delivery. To date, they had been delivering statements in a PDF format that restricted how the information could be extracted. Internal teams wanted to:

• — Include credit ratings from a well-known provider in client statements.
• — Have a flexible data delivery mechanism.
• — Be able to share the data with clients in a format that could be easily manipulated.

The team reached out to Market Intelligence to see what was possible.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence discussed RatingsXpress delivered via XpressfeedTM, a powerful data feed management solution. This would provide the asset manager with:

	Access to trusted credit ratings	RatingsXpress offers one of the industry’s largest databases of current and historical credit ratings from S&P Global Ratings with entity- and security-level data in one schema. The credit ratings cover nearly one million securities: — 9,000 global issuers, including corporates, financial institutions, utility and insurance companies/80,000 securities.[1] — 550 sovereign, international public finance and government entities/13,000 securities. — 700 U.S. public finance entities/690,000 securities. 10,000 structured finance transactions, including asset-backed, commercial mortgage-backed and residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations/45,000 securities.
	Reliable and flexible delivery	Xpressfeed offers streamlined delivery of credit ratings from S&P Global Ratings. The solution enables asset managers to ensure accurate, timely delivery of critical information while helping to automate client statement reporting processes.
Figure 1: Sample Excel FileSource: S&P Global Market Intelligence. For illustrative purposes only.

Key Benefits

The asset manager is now able to license data in a way that: 

• — Satisfies growing client demand for statements that can be manipulated.
• — Seamlessly shares information as needed.

^{[1] Coverage numbers as of January 2024.}