Standard & Poor’s background

With offices in 23 countries and a history that dates back 150 years, Standard & Poor’s is known to investors worldwide as a leader of financial-market intelligence.

Most notably, we are known as an independent provider of credit ratings. In 2009, we published more than 870,000 and revised credits ratings. Currently, we rate more than US$32 trillion in outstanding debt.

Standard & Poor’s is also widely known for maintaining one of the most widely followed indices of large-cap American stocks: the S&P 500. In 2007, the S&P 500 celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Approximately $1.1 trillion in investment assets is directly tied to S&P indexes, and more than $3.5 trillion is benchmarked to the S&P 500 – more than any other index in the world.

Key Challenges

Automated production of 150 monthly Research oriented factsheets
Output needed to be available within two working days of the publication of month end figures
Desire to remove any Marketing Department involvement in factsheet production
Data sourced from internal systems, third party data providers and more than 60 fund management groups
To ensure that the factsheets were released as early as possible in the month all performance and risk statistics were to be calculated by the factsheet system utilising raw price feeds
Client required a completely ‘hands-off service’ therefore passed all first and second level QA across to the factsheet provider

Director of Operations, Standard & Poor’s

“Projects of this type are seldom without their difficulties and Factbook have been highly pro-active, showing great creativity and pragmatism in driving towards a solution.

Their willingness to go far beyond what could reasonably be expected of any business partner has been the most impressive aspect of their involvement – and they are a pleasure to work with.”

Solutions

Using a Factbook Factsheets™ production environment, in conjunction with elements of Factbook’s Data Management™ suite, a fully automated factsheet production facility was deployed in a little under six weeks.

In addition to the standard production environment Factbook provided the client with a bespoke online QA and review tool which allowed the client to review all updated factsheet content prior to the production of the final output documents. In addition to allowing content review the system also allowed the client to carry out last minute content edits (in a secure and fully audited environment), thus insuring that 98.5% of monthly productions could be fulfilled with a single monthly run, thereby removing the delays associated with document reruns and multiple productions.