S&P Global has agreed to acquire IHS Markit for about $44B in an all-stock deal, which would merge two of the largest providers of financial data and analysis
Context & Ripple Effects
S&P Global has spent the past few years assembling its data-and-analytics stack piece by piece — the $550M Kensho acquisition brought AI and machine-learning tooling for Wall Street firms in-house in 2018. The IHS Markit deal is the scale move on top of that foundation: an all-stock combination of two of the largest financial-data providers at roughly $44B.
It also lands mid-wave. The London Stock Exchange's ~$27B all-stock acquisition of Refinitiv a year earlier showed exchanges and index owners buying data assets outright, and the pattern has since spread beyond finance into vertical software with Synopsys' advanced talks for Ansys. Data ownership, not just distribution, is what these buyers are paying for.
First-order effects
- S&P Global and IHS Markit shareholders become owners of one combined entity spanning indices, ratings, benchmarks, and energy/market data — while rivals like LSE-owned Refinitiv immediately face a competitor with a broader proprietary dataset.
Second-order effects
- Remaining independent data and analytics vendors come under consolidation pressure: the Refinitiv and IHS Markit deals set a template that later transactions such as Broadcom's talks for SAS and SS&C's purchase of Intralinks follow, as buyers chase scale in proprietary data rather than point products.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, financial information consolidates around a handful of vertically integrated platforms bundling benchmarks, ratings, analytics, and AI — raising the odds that regulators scrutinize how much of the market's reference data sits under fewer roofs.
The trend: Financial data and analytics is consolidating through mega-scale all-stock combinations, as exchanges and index owners buy proprietary datasets to bundle with their own franchises.