It was the year 1860 when, on the eve of the Civil War, the publication of the timetable of the railways of the United States took off, the first activity of Standard & Poor's , today S&P, the award-winning company which, still 160 years later for the Wall Street Journal represents "the obligatory shortcut for assessing the state of health of the financial markets", thanks to its stock index and rating on bond issuesand, indispensable for navigating between bonds such as the old train schedule moving between New York and Philadelphia.
The agreement was reached between the two Boards and the old Lord of the markets, today marries in the person of IHS Markit, a young Londoner born in 2016 from the merger of two companies that collect millions of data thanks to the software used by large banks and financial companies to underwrite bonds and stocks, as well as data on trading on the oil and other raw materials market in which it has so far fought with Platt's, another index controlled by S&P. This, in short, is the financial marriage of the century. S&P walks down the aisle with a valuation of $82 billion, IHS Markit is valued at an enterprise value of $44 billion including $4,8 billion of net debt. The wedding, naturally paper against paper, provides for S&P to take control with the sale of securities for a corresponding amount.
Some numbers are not surprising. Since the eighties when Michael Bloomberg realized that the future would pass from the control of electronics, financial products, faster and faster, have retired the old traders replaced by increasingly sophisticated strategies linked to data control. Hence the progressive transformation of the business: the old stock lists are transforming themselves into aggressive market players, capable of making the data requested by operators hungry for information available, naturally for a fee. And so the various exchanges were able to cope with the decline in commission income with the proceeds of the various S&P and Factsheets. It is no coincidence that a real race for mergers has been unleashed in recent years. Blackstone has sold the giant to the London Stock Exchange Refinitiv, new name of Thomson Reuters paid 27 billion dollars without hesitating to sacrifice Borsa Italiana much less profitable, especially in perspective. To evaluate the potential of controlling these data machines, it is enough to say that since 2017, the first year of full activity of IHS Markit, born on the initiative of 12 banks, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, the value of the security has multiplied by three.
