Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a major role in most economies. They represent the majority of businesses worldwide and are important contributors to job creation and global economic development. According to The World Bank, SMEs account for approximately 90% of global businesses and more than 50% of worldwide employment.^[1]

This large investment bank in Italy saw the untapped potential of the SME market in Europe. While very familiar with large corporate clients, members of the firm's excellence center realized that a different approach would be needed if they were to increase their footprint in the SME space.

The team wanted to solidify the firm's position as a leading financial institution in digital transformation by creating an investment banking platform that would provide SMEs with data-driven solutions. This would include high-quality company financial and industry data, plus insights on the debt, equity and M&A markets. SMEs would then be able to make more informed decisions based on market dynamics and track their performance relative to peers. For this to be successful, the team needed to populate the platform with comprehensive and reliable third-party data to complement bank proprietary information.

As a leader in digital transformation, the investment bank wanted to develop a robust platform loaded with valuable intelligence to help SMEs accelerate their businesses.

Pain Points

Members of the excellence team faced several challenges as they looked to expand their services with SMEs. This included lack of access to reliable third-party data to provide valuable insights via the investment banking platform. The team wanted to find an information provider that could offer:

• Detailed financial information for both public and private companies.
• Business profiles of companies, including contact details.
• An understanding of relationships that exist between companies.
• A way to link the data to provide a holistic picture of a company.
• A simple way to deliver everything to the investment banking platform being developed.

With this in place, the excellence team would be able to generate investment ideas for lead generation. The team reached out to S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market intelligence") to see what was possible.

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence discussed the firm's extensive data assets that could help power the investment banking platform. They also outlined a collaborative approach that would involve working closely with the team to test the data portion of the platform as it was being developed. The data assets would provide the ability to:

	Understand a company's business	Company Intelligence provides profiles of public and private firms worldwide, including company contact information, competitors, financial auditors and summary or detailed-level business descriptions.
	Assess a company's current and historical financial performance	The Private Company Financials dataset provides 200+ standardized financial statement items for 12+ million private companies globally. S&P Capital IQ Financials provides standardized financial data on an annual, quarterly, semi-annual, last twelve month and year-to-date basis for public companies. It includes: 5,000+ financial, supplemental and industry-specific data items for 150,000+ companies globally, including 95,000+ active and inactive companies across multiple industries. Detailed debt and equity capital structure data. Historical annual and interim data as far back as 1985 for certain datasets and geographies, with significant coverage from 1993.
	View hierarchies and company relationships	The S&P Capital IQ Company Relationships package is a global database of all relationships that exist between companies in the S&P Capital IQ universe. Relationship types include acquisitions, investments, investment arms, lenders, affiliates, index providers and more. Each relationship is categorized as current, prior, pending or canceled.
	Easily search for companies	The Business Entity Cross Reference Service (BECRS) provides immediate cross-reference capabilities for millions of public and private entities using standardized and proprietary identifiers. Users can search companies by name, as well as by:  Global tax IDs, VAT and registration IDs. Rating IDs from S&P Global, Moody's and Fitch. D&B Duns IDs, Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) and Markit Red Codes. Internal Entity IDs: GVkey and SNL Institutional IDs. Ultimate parent IDs for companies with greater than 50% ownership. Domicile codes for headquarters and country of registration.
	Streamline the data flow into the SME platform	XpressfeedTM, S&P Global's powerful data feed management solution, delivers data directly to client applications.

Key Benefits

Members of the excellence center immediately saw the value of Market Intelligence's rich data and delivery solution and the opportunity to collaborate with data experts throughout the many months of development. The investment bank can now:

• Expand its services by leveraging the platform to introduce investment ideas to mid-market companies, many of which are private.
• Differentiate its offering by providing access to high-quality financial and industry data, enabling users to understand market dynamics to drive strategic planning and investment opportunities, plus evaluate how their peer group is performing.
• Combine the data with bank-specific functions on the portal, such as service presentations and the ability to arrange meetings, to enhance the customer experience.

^{[1] “SMEs Finance”, The World Bank, 2017, www.worldbank.org/en/topic/smefinance.}