This year's Equities Leaders Summit was particularly exciting as it was our first time attending this conference as S&P Global Market Intelligence. Plus, it coincided with the launch of InvestorAccess, our platform for helping equity investors manage compressed deal timelines and busy new issuance days. We saw many familiar faces, which allowed us to introduce InvestorAccess in person and thoroughly demonstrate its advanced Equity Capital Markets analytics. Moreover, we spoke to several portfolio managers who were already aware of how underwriters use our technology to streamline book-building workflows for the US IPOs they purchase.

The investors we spoke to agreed that direct order entry for new equity issues would improve their workflows' productivity and better track their orders across multiple syndicate desks. Many investors shared that they envision order entry automating a critical aspect of their workflow and will complement traditional forms of engagement with their sales coverage and syndicate desks. The event also enabled us to collect feedback on capabilities market practitioners would like to see added to our platforms, with many endorsing future work to expand InvestorAccess into index rebalancing, block trades, and tender offers.

The S&P Global Market Intelligence booth was coincidentally next to multiple order management system (OMS) and execution management system (EMS) providers who spoke with us throughout the week about the technology and services that make up their unique value in the market. Integration with OMS/EMS providers is one of our top priorities this year. We have begun enabling interoperability through APIs and working with buy-side customers to integrate with their proprietary systems and prioritize third-party connectivity to expand their choice of providers.

The highlight of every conversation we've had with investors was explaining that InvestorAccess has more than 20 years of enriched equity issuance data along with the ability for a customer to analyze their primary market activity across lead managers. With every conversation, it became clear that order entry would create significant efficiency gains within their new issue workflow while the data and analytics could drive alpha.

Three sunny days in Miami, FL, with teammates combined with delightful client dinners and an engaging buy-side roundtable made the Equity Leaders' Summit an absolute pleasure to attend. The biggest lesson we learned about conferences during the pandemic is that attending a virtual conference is about as fulfilling as eating a virtual steak dinner.

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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.