The new advisory business provides risk-based non-discretionary equity, fixed income portfolio strategies, asset allocation, and fund review services to asset managers and currently advises on over $18 billion in total assets.

Global Markets Intelligence operates through S&P Investment Advisory Services in the US, and McGraw Hill Research Europe Limited in the UK and Europe. The group is supported by S&P Capital IQ's broad, proprietary arsenal of data, analytics and research.

"The Global Markets Intelligence business is a great example of how S&P Capital IQ continues to leverage proprietary content, analytics and intellectual property to help our customers drive growth," said Lou Eccleston, President, S&P Capital IQ and S&P Indices.

"The key to the Global Markets Intelligence approach is that our methodologies are built with risk mitigation components as core, not as a separate overlay. This risk-based approach is at the heart of generating superior risk-adjusted returns," said Michael Thompson, Managing Director and Head, Global Markets Intelligence at S&P Capital IQ. 

Separately, S&P Capital IQ today announced the integration of Standard & Poor's Credit Ratings within Xpressfeed, the firm's enterprise data feed management solution. Xpressfeed provides users access to qualitative and quantitative content from S&P Capital IQ, including public and private company information, S&P Indices, third-party content and now Standard & Poor's Credit Ratings. This addition provides financial professionals access to the full universe and history of credit ratings from Standard & Poor's Ratings Services. Xpressfeed allows credit ratings to be delivered at a near real time frequency, daily and monthly.

"This latest version of Xpressfeed allows for quantitative investors to analyze over 50 years of correlated fundameed fundamental and ratings content in a way that has previously never been examined." said Jonathan Reeve, Executive Managing Director for S&P Capital IQ. "Our addition of ratings content is part of an ongoing process to identify and provide clients with access to useful and timely information to make important financial decisions."

Xpressfeed provides buy-side and sell-side professionals a turnkey database with loading and maintenance technology for reliable, efficient data delivery and management. Xpressfeed delivers a comprehensive data suite via FTP in conjunction with the Xpressfeed Loader, a tool that automatically downloads files from an FTP site and processes them into a relational data warehouse. Clients are able to retrieve both current and historical S&P credit ratings alongside any dataset currently available in Xpressfeed.

The Xpressfeed Loader also allows clients to customize data retrieval times enabling full control over data management. As an example, the platform can be used to help users identify counterparty risk connections between corporate obligors of municipal bonds and that corporation's capital structure, stock history and other key company information that help investors make informed decisions. With the addition of Standard & Poor's Ratings in Xpressfeed clients can link the municipal debt obligated by a corporation directly to the rich company level information that Xpressfeed clients have come to rely on.

Standard & Poor's Credit Ratings, one of the largest global credit rating databases available, offers numerous packages within Xpressfeed, such as Global Issuers, Structured Finance and Public Finance with historical data back to 1922. Data can be delivered near real time, daily and monthly.