IHS Markit

Lance Uggla served as Chairman and CEO of IHS Markit from its 2016 formation through the 2022 sale to S&P Global. Uggla had previously founded Markit in 2003 and led it through a 2014 IPO before engineering the merger with IHS. After the S&P Global transaction closed, he became a special advisor to S&P Global's CEO, a role designed to ensure continuity during the integration of the two firms' financial-data businesses.

IHS Markit sold data subscriptions, analytics tools, and processing software to banks, asset managers, corporations, and governments. Its revenue was overwhelmingly recurring, derived from long-term contracts for services such as bond pricing, trade confirmation, index licensing, and economic-forecast subscriptions. The firm did not manage external investment portfolios; it supplied the information layer on which portfolio decisions were made.

Its flagship products included the Markit CDS pricing service, which became the standard reference for credit-derivative valuations; the iBoxx bond index family, widely licensed for ETFs and benchmarking; and the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) surveys, among the most closely watched leading economic indicators globally. The MarkitSERV platform also processed a dominant share of over-the-counter derivative trade confirmations.

S&P Global acquired IHS Markit to combine its credit ratings, benchmark indices, and commodity price assessments with Markit's fixed-income pricing, trade-processing, and private-market data. The deal eliminated a major competitor in financial data, created cross-sell opportunities across a combined customer base, and gave S&P Global direct ownership of the PMI franchise and the iBoxx index suite, both of which generated significant recurring revenue.

The company traces its roots to two separate entities. Markit was founded in 2003 by Lance Uggla, a former CIBC World Markets executive, initially to provide daily credit-derivative pricing. IHS Inc. originated in 1959 as Information Handling Services, an engineering-document microfilm company. Both grew through decades of acquisition — IHS into energy, automotive, and maritime data; Markit into indices, trade processing, and private-market analytics — before their 2016 combination.

In its final full fiscal year before the deal, IHS Markit reported revenue of roughly $4.4 billion and employed approximately 16,000 people globally (per the firm, 2021). The purchase price of $44 billion in S&P Global stock reflected a significant premium and valued the combined entity at roughly $140 billion in market capitalization at announcement.

No. Following the February 2022 close of the acquisition by S&P Global, the IHS Markit brand was retired. Its operations were folded into S&P Global Market Intelligence and S&P Global Commodity Insights. Products like the PMI surveys and iBoxx indices continue under the S&P Global brand.