GC: What is the overarching philosophy that drives your approach to S&P Capital IQ Pro?
Breakstone: Decisions are rarely made with one set of data, no matter how unique, compelling, or alternative that data happens to be. We’ve found that the best decisions are made when multiple data sets come together, and one can apply their expertise, experience, and various tools to the effort. This is true for all our clients, whether an asset manager looking for investment opportunities, a bank conducting valuations, or a corporate strategy team assessing market adjacencies. This philosophy drives our overall approach and integrated value proposition. You can see it in the 220 high-quality data sets — traditional and alternative — we’ve combined and enhanced with compelling visualizations and analytics in our flagship S&P Capital IQ Pro today.
GC: How does this integrated value proposition translate into your investments?
Breakstone: We focus our investment efforts on three areas. First, sourcing the best data and combining it with other content that we offer in valuable and relevant ways. Second, we enhance our data with compelling visualisations for quicker analysis. Third, we increasingly leverage analytics, including GenAI, to make the platform more intelligent and the experience for clients more enticing. For example, in just the past few months we expanded our fixed income data coverage to 19.5 million securities. We added Nikkei News through an exclusive partnership to provide more global context and commentary, and we extended our private company data coverage to millions more companies.
We also acquired Visible Alpha — the leader in forecast data — which provides a cohesive view of future performance expectations in the context of the historical performance of a company, sector, or industry. These data sets are additive and build off each other to provide greater range and depth for a user’s research and analysis. This followed the addition of ChartIQ to our portfolio last year, which has enhanced the platform’s visualisation capabilities.
GC: What led you to acquire Visible Alpha?
Breakstone: Visible Alpha was founded in 2015 by a consortium of leading investment banks to bring new value to sell-side research assets. Today, contribution partnerships exist with over 200 leading banks and research houses, and numerous sell-side institutions exclusively contribute. These relationships have allowed Visible Alpha access to raw sell-side analyst models—source material that was not previously available at scale to businesses like ours.
This strategic acquisition deepens our fundamental research and analysis capabilities and opens opportunities to further our deep sector and asset-level offerings. For example, we can tie Visible Alpha forecasts for metals and mining companies with existing Capital IQ Pro datasets. Users could compare mine-level NAV forecasts from Visible Alpha with mine-level volume and production cost data from Capital IQ Pro. Combining Visible Alpha’s rich dataset with that of Capital IQ Solutions creates many exciting opportunities to develop new insights for our clients.
GC: S&P Global has added a suite of GenAI solutions to the Capital IQ Pro platform, what are some of the benefits that brings to users?
Breakstone: We have introduced many innovative capabilities to support our clients and what we term “speed to decision.” I’ll give two examples. First is our reimagined Document Intelligence solution, which has revolutionised how clients can incorporate insights from vast text-based content. Eighty-page filings and earnings call transcripts can now be summarised in microseconds, and critical insights are surfaced in a snap. Clients can interact with the document as if speaking to a seasoned analyst. The system also generates questions and prompts you may want to use, saving time and delivering new insights.
Second, working with our partners at Kensho, the S&P Global AI innovation hub, we just introduced ChatIQ, which is the first GenAI solution in the market trained on a broad corpus of financial and company data from S&P Global. Using a modern interface, clients can ask natural language requests and receive comprehensive answers. They can also click through to the source data found in the platform. Trust and transparency are foundational to our products; by providing direct access to the source data, we are helping customers make informed decisions—even with generative AI.
GC: What’s next for Capital IQ Pro?
Breakstone: We’ll stay focused on extending our integrated value proposition in relevant ways to support our 350,000 users across the institutional buy-side, global sell-side and corporate segments. We’ll continue investing in data, extending our visualisation and tools, and introducing deeper analytics for the client’s benefit. The future is bright for Capital IQ Pro, and we are excited for what comes next.