S&P buys ChartIQ to bolster charting, analytics capabilities

S&P Global has acquired ChartIQ, the HTML5 charting library of Charlottesville, Virginia-based Finsemble Inc. (formerly Cosaic, see box below), for an undisclosed sum. The deal was made to bolster the charting capabilities of its Capital IQ Pro desktop workstation and to make the ChartIQ charts available as added data visualization tools to customers of its broader data products.

S&P has already created beta versions of some new charting pages within Capital IQ that incorporate text analytics from DocViewer—a tool developed by S&P’s 2018 acquisition of Kensho to provide insight on unstructured text documents within seconds—combined with sentiment scores and displayed in ChartIQ charts.

The key drivers of the acquisition were the ability to extract and visualize insight from the wealth of data across the S&P and IHS Markit empire, says Warren Breakstone, head of desktop and channel solutions at S&P Market Intelligence.

“When you think about the vast explosion of data the industry is experiencing, the questions become, how do you get insight, and how do you get that quickly and easily,” Breakstone tells WatersTechnology.

“We have 135 billion data points in Capital IQ Pro. So, how do we enable our clients to get insights out of that data quickly?”

The answer involves a mix of different solutions. First on the list is incorporating Kensho’s DocViewer and ChartIQ both into Capital IQ Pro.

“It’s about modernizing our charting and combining best-in-class charting capabilities with best-in-class data in our workflow tool. So, we’re replacing and upgrading what we have, and clients will get the benefits of charting that’s not only powerful, but is also very intuitive,” Breakstone says.

The vendor will make ChartIQ charts available in Capital IQ this summer, with full integration anticipated by year-end. The second opportunity that S&P hopes to exploit is to integrate its vast datasets into ChartIQ for the benefit of existing ChartIQ clients, giving them access to broader data for the first time, or potentially allowing S&P to displace other vendors’ data that clients previously used to power ChartIQ displays.

“[ChartIQ has] a terrific business of syndicating their charting packages to clients in the industry,” Breakstone says. “The opportunity for us now is to couple the charting with data from S&P Global to enhance that proposition to our clients.”

This capability will be available even sooner than the Capital IQ integration because mutual clients are already performing this for themselves using existing loaders provided by ChartIQ that allow clients to load their own data or data from other providers.

In fact, mutual clients provided one of the use cases that made the deal make sense. S&P approached Finsemble about selling ChartIQ last spring, says Finsemble co-founder and CEO Dan Schleifer, though the companies weren’t strangers—their offices in Charlottesville are right across the street from each other. More importantly, the two companies already share mutual clients, some of whom use Capital IQ Pro as a data source and augment it with ChartIQ’s charts, and others who use ChartIQ charts within the Markit Digital platform (formerly known as Wall Street on Demand) that clients use to build tailored investment portals for end-users and investors.

“Many of those Markit Digital clients may have a need for charting capabilities within their solutions that they extend to external customers. So, having ChartIQ capabilities allows the Markit Digital team to offer that to clients, where it makes sense,” Breakstone says.

Furthermore, extricating ChartIQ from Finsemble—before it can be integrated into S&P—will not be hard, Schleifer says, since the company by design always kept ChartIQ and the Finsemble desktop integration business separate.

“ChartIQ and Finsemble have always been run with separate teams and technology stacks, so separation is a clean process,” he says. “We always recognized that to reach their maximum potential, each needed to be set in its own direction.”

The deal includes all of the 20-plus engineering, client success, and sales staff who work for ChartIQ (aside from some Finsemble employees in shared services roles, such as accounting and HR), including Eugene Sorenson, chief product officer at Finsemble and head of ChartIQ; VP of sales Ryan Erickson; SVP of engineering Gus Matlis; and chief architect Robert Bruckheimer.

Breakstone says that while the job titles of ChartIQ staff may be harmonized to fit S&P’s corporate structure, their job functions will remain the same.

“This acquisition is as much about great talent as it is about great technology,” he says.

‘It’s like sending my first-born off to college’

Though he won’t be part of the acquisition, instead remaining CEO of parent company Finsemble Inc., Schleifer says a key aspect of the deal was ensuring that it was a good technical and cultural fit for ChartIQ and its staff, and that it would be additive for the product and career-wise for affected employees.

“As founder, it was important to me that the company, product, and team could be taken to their full potential,” he says. “It’s like sending my first-born off to college.”

In fact, he says he’s turned down previous offers over the years from other companies that didn’t offer such a good fit.

When you spend time focused on charting, being part of a big data company is like being a kid in a candy store

Warren Breakstone, S&P

“We’ve had a lot of interest over the years in ChartIQ, but we never found such a good fit as S&P,” Schleifer says, noting that S&P’s Capital IQ Pro workstation has more than 300,000 users and could be enriched by ChartIQ’s data visualization capabilities, while the broader S&P Global has trillions of data points that could benefit from the ability to create visualizations using ChartIQ.

“The strategy Warren has outlined for ChartIQ is additive. It won’t just become a feature of Capital IQ Pro, but the B2B business will continue to grow, bolstered by S&P’s salesforce,” he says. “They see ChartIQ as a technology that could be used globally by Capital IQ Pro and others, but they also see value in the business we’ve built and the client relationships we bring to the table, and how they can take the ChartIQ product and distribute it to the thousands of clients that S&P has.”

And just as with the Kensho acquisition, there may even be as-yet unidentified opportunities to leverage ChartIQ beyond the initial scope of integration. “When you spend time focused on charting,” Breakstone says, “being part of a big data company is like being a kid in a candy store.”