Mead Project - S&P Global
Authors: David Jia and Gavin Schuetz
For our final journey of the semester, the members of the Mead Project took a trip to the S&P global office in Charlottesville, Virginia. On a size scale, this was definitely the biggest company we have toured to date, living up to its “global” status with over 70 offices in 35 different countries.
Contrary to what most people think of when they hear S&P, it is not just stock indexes like the S&P 500. S&P Global’s primary areas of business are financial information and analytics, and it is the parent company of several well-known subsidiaries, including S&P Global Ratings, S&P Global Market Intelligence, S&P Global Mobility, S&P Global Engineering Solutions, S&P Global Sustainable, and S&P Global Commodity Insights. The Charlottesville office was focused primarily on their Market Intelligence division.
Our visit began with a warm welcome at the office, where we were greeted by Jay Gaffney, a Senior Manager of Client Operations, and led to a conference room with multiple teams specializing in different parts of the company's work there to speak to us.
The meeting started with a presentation on the role of Market Intelligence as a whole, delivered by Mike Clark, an Associate Director. There were many aspects going into S&P Global’s approach to Market Intelligence, with an overall focus on efficiency of data collecting while keeping the quality of data intact. They emphasized the importance of vetting the data to ensure accuracy while also presenting it in a way that made it understandable to clients, adding value to the data by their verification and presentation.
Now that we understood the basics of what S&P aimed to do with the data they collected, the data team (Zuhaib Gull and Zain Tariq) began their presentation of its pivotal role in driving informed decision-making across various industries. Their main focuses were split between two primary tasks, data dispatch and research & analysis. The Charlottesville office covered a variety of banking types, ranging from commercial banks to saving loan associations. We were then introduced to the variety of players in the regulatory sphere including the federal reserve, OCC, and FDIC. Zuhaib was an assistant manager of the US financial institutions research group where he presented on status quo rising interest rates and other recent events that were on his radar.
Next up, we delved into the heart of S&P Global's operations – their cutting-edge analytics platform. Going by the name of CIQPro (Capital IQ Pro), this web-based portal contains the data of more than 60,000 public firms and 52 million private firms. The sheer volume of information being processed and analyzed in real-time baffled us, with the incredible precision and efficiency it functioned at with such large sets of data. While finding the exact information one is looking for can seem like finding a needle in a haystack, S&P Global has recognized this and dedicated many resources to helping clients learn the technology, offering full-time customer service options as well as the development on a natural language chatbot called ScreenIQ to help users navigate the data. Representatives of the data science team, Ming Yu, Mackenzye Leroy, and Dr. Alec Gosse discussed the Screen IQ Project with us. John Frazee, a Senior Product Manager of Platforms, further gave a fun, interactive presentation about the platform.
Witnessing firsthand how data science powered S&P Global's renowned financial models was an amazing experience. We were given a perspective on the models and data which drive market insights and predictions relied upon by investors worldwide. It was fascinating to see how intricate patterns and trends were extracted from the seemingly chaotic data, enabling informed decision-making in the fast-paced world of finance. Going back to the first presentation, the value that S&P global creates is from being able to not only access and record an amount of data, but also having the talent onboard its team to market, vet, present, and assist with that data as well.
In addition to what we learned directly in relation to data science, it was interesting to hear about all of the different backgrounds the team members had come from. S&P global is a very diverse company, with several members coming from backgrounds outside of business or data science. Something we found in common with all of the companies we visited this year is emphasis on openness to learn. A growth mindset, emphasized again by Jay Gaffney, is what allows someone to continue to develop as a person outside of traditional educational environments, such as the workspace. If you are willing to put in time and effort into a job, it is amazing how much you can learn.
With this, we conclude our year of exploration through the Mead Project. It has been a fun and enlightening experience, with many insights from great individuals and companies to help guide us on our future journeys into the workspace. While not all of us may end up in the data science field, the lessons we learned translate to more than just work. Through our talks, we learned the values that make a good employee, but also those that make a good person as well. As we continue to progress through our own lives, there is no doubt these lessons will stay with us throughout them.
