Applied Data Finance Funding, Investors & Competitors

S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. Its ratings business is the largest credit rating agency in the world and S&P's largest segment by profitability. S&P's largest segment by revenue is market intelligence, which provides desktop, data and advisory solutions, enterprise solutions, and credit/risk solutions mostly in the financial-services industry. S&P's other segments include energy (formerly commodity insights, this segment includes Platts and other data), mobility (Carfax), and indexes. S&P plans to spin off mobility in 2026.

Intercontinental Exchange is a vertically integrated operator of financial exchanges and provides ancillary data products. Though the company is probably best known for its ownership of the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013, ICE operates a large derivatives exchange, too. The company's largest commodity futures product is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. In addition to the exchanges business, which is about 54% of net revenue, Intercontinental Exchange has used a series of acquisitions to create its mortgage technology business (22% of net revenue) and fixed-income and data-services segment (24% of net revenue).

Moody’s, along with S&P Ratings, is a leading provider of credit ratings on fixed-income securities. The ratings segment, Moody’s Investors Service, includes corporates, structured finance, financial institutions, and public finance ratings. MIS represents a majority of the firm’s profit and often (depending on bond issuance levels) a majority of the firm's revenue. The other segment, Moody’s Analytics, consists of decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information.

London Stock Exchange Group is a fully integrated financial exchange company covering the financial market value chain from primary and secondary markets across multiple asset classes over data, index, and analytics down to clearing and post-trading reporting. With the acquisition of Refinitiv, LSEG generates about two thirds of its revenue from data and analytics including its FTSE Russell and WM/Refinitiv benchmarks as well as data feeds and terminals. The group is also a majority shareholder in Tradeweb, one of the dominant global fixed-income trading venues, as well as LCH, the largest clearinghouse for over-the-counter swaps globally.

Founded in 1971, Nasdaq is primarily known for its equity exchange, but in addition to its trading business (about 22.5% of sales), the company sells market and financial data to investors, offers Nasdaq-branded indexes, and lists companies through its capital access segment (42.5%). Nasdaq's newest segment, financial technology, was primarily constructed through the acquisitions of Verafin and Adenza and has expanded the company into capital management, financial crime, and regulatory compliance software (35%) as it seeks to become a diversified technology company.

Thomson Reuters is a leading global provider of business information services, delivering trusted data, technology, and expertise to professionals across legal, tax, accounting, risk, compliance, and the news and media sectors. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company combines deep domain knowledge with data and software solutions to help clients make informed decisions, manage complexity, and drive efficiency. Thomson Reuters serves legal and accounting/tax professionals, corporations, and governments worldwide, but around 75% of revenue is generated in the US. The company is known for flagship products such as Westlaw, UltraTax CS, and Reuters News.

East Money Information Co Ltd is engaged in securities business, financial e-commerce service business, financial data service business, and Internet advertising service business. It mainly provides paid financial data services, financial e-commerce services, and Internet advertisement services through its Website, eastmoney.com. It generates majority of ots revenue from the securities business.

MSCI has described its mission as enabling investors to build better portfolios for a better world. MSCI's largest and most profitable segment is its index segment, where it provides benchmarking to asset managers and asset owners. MSCI boasts over $18 trillion in benchmarked assets, including over $2.3 trillion in ETF assets linked to MSCI indexes. The MSCI analytics segment provides portfolio management and risk management analytics software to asset managers and asset owners. In its sustainability and climate segment, MSCI provides ESG data to the investment industry. In private assets, MSCI provides real restate reporting, market data, benchmarking, and analytics to investors and real estate managers.

Experian is one of the leading credit bureaus in North America and the United Kingdom, providing the consumer information that is the basis for making lending decisions. The company also provides decision analytics, marketing data, and direct-to-consumer credit products and services. Roughly one quarter of the company's revenue is generated outside of North America and the United Kingdom, primarily in Latin America and Asia.

Hithink RoyalFlush Information Network Co Ltd is engaged in providing Internet financial information services and online financial software. The company's business includes an online market trading system, mobile financial information service, fund sales, financial big data processing, and cloud services. It serves individuals, brokers, funds, private placements, banks, insurance, government, and research Institutional clients.

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in New York City, Tradeweb Markets is a leading fixed-income trading platform. While it does offer electronic processing for some voice-negotiated trades, the company focuses primarily on providing electronic trading networks that connect broker/dealers, institutional clients, and retail customers. While the company offers trading in a wide variety of products, the bulk of its business is in US and European government debt, mortgage-backed securities, interest-rate swaps, and US and international corporate bonds. The firm also sells fixed-income trading and price data, primarily through a deal with Refinitiv’s Eikon service.

Along with Experian and TransUnion, Equifax is one of the leading credit bureaus in the United States. Equifax’s credit reports provide credit histories on millions of consumers, and the firm's services are critical to lenders’ credit decisions. In addition, about 40% of the firm’s revenue comes from workforce solutions, which provides income verification and employer human resources services. Equifax generates about 25% of its revenue from outside the United States.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, which was spun off from Automatic Data Processing in 2007, is a leading provider of investor communication and technology-driven solutions to banks, broker/dealers, traditional and alternative-asset managers, wealth managers, and corporate issuers. Broadridge is composed of two operating segments: investor communication solutions and global technology and operations.

Wolters Kluwer is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services in health; tax and accounting; environmental, social, and governance; finance; compliance; and legal. More than 60% of revenue is generated in North America and around 30% is from Europe.

San Francisco-headquartered Plaid is a financial technology provider offering APIs for secure connections to bank accounts, investments, and credit data across 12,000 U.S. institutions. Founded in 2013, its infrastructure powers personal finance apps, payment processors, lending platforms, and identity verification services like those from Venmo and Coinbase.

AlphaSense is an artificial intelligence platform for market intelligence and research, founded in 2011 by Jack Kokko and Raj Neervannan and headquartered in New York City. The concept grew out of Kokko's experience as a Morgan Stanley analyst manually searching through large volumes of financial documents, and the company built a search engine that applies natural language processing and machine learning to surface insights across a vast content universe spanning company filings, earnings call and expert call transcripts, broker and equity research, news, trade journals, and private company data, indexed across many languages. Its tools include generative search, document summarisation, sentiment analysis, real-time monitoring and alerts, and AI-driven deep research that returns sourced, citable answers. The platform serves asset managers, investment banks, consultancies, corporations, life sciences firms, and private equity, counting thousands of enterprise customers including a large share of the S&P 100 and major global banks. It expanded its capabilities through acquisitions of Sentieo and expert-research provider Tegus, and has raised well over a billion dollars across multiple financing rounds from investors such as Viking Global Investors, Goldman Sachs, BDT & MSD Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Alphabet's CapitalG, and BOND, reaching a valuation in the region of four billion dollars.

Carta is a San Francisco-headquartered transfer agent and equity management platform for private companies from seed to pre-IPO stages. The service digitizes stock certificates, options, warrants, and derivatives, providing real-time cap table visibility to shareholders, employees, auditors, and legal teams.

CYBERA is a London-based fintech security platform launched in 2023 helping banks combat scams through real-time transaction monitoring. The service recovers assets for victims via blockchain tracing and reimburses via insurance pools, partnering with HSBC and NatWest in UK. CYBERA processes 1 million daily alerts using ML models trained on £2 billion fraud data.