Spiros Giannaros, managing director at Markit EDM, talks with Dan DeFrancesco at WatersTechnology about the vendor's continued success in the data management category of the Buy-Side Technology Awards, and how it aims to continue that evolution.

Q: IHS Markit's Markit EDM data management platform is no stranger to the BST Awards winners' circle. What sets it apart from other solutions year after year?

Spiros Giannaros, managing director, Markit EDM: There are a number of factors that have contributed to our success over the years. The flexibility of our solution is a key factor. We provide customers with the ability to acquire and move integrated and transformed data without requiring the use of a fixed, or single, data model. We can also support any type of entity data. We continue to see use-cases expanding from core reference data into account, position, product, legal entity, transaction and regulatory datasets. Data aggregation, reconciliation and market data optimization for cost control are also focus areas for a large number of our customers.

Our ability to service the unique needs of any type of firm around data, workflow and integration is another important factor in our success. We work with 45 of the top 100 asset managers and we have 30 of the top banks/administrators as customers, as well as a number of vendors and regulators.

Finally, our commitment to consistently delivering value to customers over a short timeframe is a critical part of our business ethos. Our strong implementation track record means we have been able to onboard over 100 customers in the past four years alone.

Q: How has Markit EDM changed over the past 12 months? What new features have been added? What prompted this? Customer feedback? Industry trends?

Giannaros: As customers' datasets grow in size and quantity and service level agreements become shorter, we have enhanced the performance of Markit EDM by introducing full in-memory and concurrent processing and an innovative new matcher to normalize data. New and improved matching capabilities include use of more expansive rules and pattern-matching of names.

We've also witnessed increased demand for our managed services offering over the past 12 months with 40 to 50 percent of all new customers adopting the managed services platform. This model is gaining traction in the market as firms see the benefits of having access to a centralized team that will manage the integration work, and, once the application has been implemented, will deliver changes and upgrades quickly and efficiently.

Q: What type of new enhancements can users look forward to over the next 12 months for Markit EDM?

Giannaros: When firms bring reference and investment data together and cleanse that data, they find themselves sitting on a very powerful dataset. Over the coming months, we will deliver more business value through helping our customers to surface this data-not just for exception management, but also for more strategic business opportunities. Customers will be able to easily access and query their data through new customizable dashboards and responsive layouts, including grids, charts and KPIs. We will also be looking at the configurability of these dashboards and reports so that we deliver an excellent end-user experience.

Q: IHS Markit was one of just three recipients of service to the industry awards at this year's BST Awards. What does this award mean to the firm and how does it reflect IHS Markit's ability to evolve with the industry?

Giannaros: Since our core business focus is data management, we are always looking at how we can continue to evolve our solution to meet changing customer and market requirements. Our longer-term strategy is focused on building an end-to-end data ecosystem based on four main components:

• Data governance-Who owns the data, where did it come from, and how is it used and by whom?
• Data management-Our core offering focused on a central hub to acquire, validate, master and distribute all types of data.
• Data warehousing-Storing data in an accessible way over time.
• Data delivery-How can customers access the data to serve different business needs?

We've received positive feedback on this future direction of the business and we're looking forward to working closely with our customers on another successful year to come.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of WatersTechnology.

S&P Global provides industry-leading data, software and technology platforms and managed services to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in financial markets. We help our customers better understand complicated markets, reduce risk, operate more efficiently and comply with financial regulation.

This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.