Recently in New York, IHS Markit proudly accepted three top honors at the 2019 GlobalCapital Americas Derivatives Awards, including:

• Risk Management, Pricing and Valuation Provider of the Year
• Index Administration and Benchmark Services Provider of the Year
• Index Product Creator and Developer of the Year

Naturally, we are delighted that our teams have been recognized once again for their excellence - this is the sixth consecutive year that GlobalCapital has honored IHS Markit with awards.

While the bar for competition is high, we believe these ongoing accolades demonstrate our commitment to delivering value to clients across financial markets. They also reinforce the fact that our product strategies, roadmaps and business plans are executed in alignment with the progressive needs of global institutions.

Over the last year, as financial markets continued to evolve, we've worked diligently to keep our services up to speed with the pace of change.

The following highlights shine a light on those efforts in each area.

Risk Management, Pricing and Valuations

As previously mentioned, emerging regulatory regimes can create challenges, but when firms are armed with best-in-class data, technology and expertise, they can transform those challenges into practical opportunities for increasing efficiency, reducing risk and optimizing costs - and that's what we are all about.

In line with this philosophy, the following milestones have been achieved over the last year:

• End-to-End Coverage for Initial Margin - we launched a fully-hosted, independent Initial Margin Calculation Service that includes risk sensitivity calculations using the ISDA SIMM model, and integrates with Margin Xchange for documentation, as well as our collateral management system and third-party reconciliation tool.
• Best Execution Support for OTC Derivatives - leveraging our Portfolio Valuations offering, we expanded our multi-asset coverage for Best Execution requirements, providing slippage calculations for firms to perform transaction cost analysis (TCA).
• IBOR Transition Support - ahead of the 2021 transition, At IHS Markit, we introduced solutions for sell-side and buy-side, including SOFR consensus curves and independent valuations for swaps and basis swaps.
• Securitized Products UMBS - introduced a new Securitized Products Uniform Mortgage-Backed Security (UMBS) instrument page within Price Viewer to support Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's unification of their eligible TBA markets into a single market. This new instrument page identifies the corresponding Gold Pool MBS and Mirror Pool UMBS instruments.
• CDS Pricing Data Enhancements - expanded our CDS offering to include CDS sector curves, CDS Live - which provides intraday pricing data, and expanded coverage for credit options - all now available via Price Viewer.
• OTC Derivatives Data - for FRTB and risk management use cases, we expanded our historical coverage across asset classes and increased coverage for complex derivatives, in addition to developing visualized curves and volatility surfaces for greater transparency.
• DeriveXperts Acquisition - expanding our footprint into French markets, we acquired DeriveXperts, increasing our coverage for linked notes and structured products.

Index Administration and Benchmark Services

Provisions of the European Union's Benchmark Regulation (BMR) went into effect in 2018, creating forward-looking challenges for EU and non-EU benchmark providers in the Single Market. As an established leader in this space, we became one of the first authorized benchmark administrators under the terms of BMR - enabling any firm to continue referencing a broad range of financial and commodity indices from IHS Markit ahead of regulatory requirements, while establishing a cost-effective BMR compliance alternative for clients of our index administration services.

To build upon our core expertise as an independent administrator, we also went ahead of the curve by gaining the ability to endorse non-EU benchmark providers for compliance with BMR. This can help non-EU providers maintain Single Market access after the regulation's transitional period ends in 2022, at which time there will be limited options to do so.

We recently addressed these topics at a workshop with UK/European regulators and key industry stakeholders.

Index Product Creation and Development

2018 was a pivotal year of growth for our global franchise of indices across fixed income and equity:

• CDS Indices - our CDX and iTraxx indices traded approximately $2 trillion per month, with significant volume growth in tranches and options.
• iBoxx Corporate Bond and Leveraged Loan Indices - monthly notional volumes of standardized total return swaps (TRS) referencing our indices reached a new peak of almost $20 billion, with more than 240 active market participants trading iBoxx TRS.
• Launch of iBoxx iShares Corporate Bond Futures - in partnership with Cboe and BlackRock, we introduced the first-ever investment grade and high yield US corporate bond index futures, enabling additional exposure and liquidity in the $8.8 trillion market.
• Launch of iBoxx ChinaBond Indices - to expand foreign access to China's estimated $13 trillion bond market, we launched international, independent fixed income benchmarks in alliance with ChinaBond Pricing Center (CBPC), the leading pricing provider for the world's third largest fixed income market.

In reviewing our achievements across businesses, we thank our colleagues for all their valuable efforts. We look forward to building upon our successes and continuously delivering superior value to clients.

By Ed Chidsey, Managing Director - Pricing Valuations & Reference Data, IHS Markit and Frans Scheepers, Executive Director - Indices, North America

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.