London and New York, NY – Markit, a leading, global financial information services company, was voted best provider for evaluated prices and reference data at the Incisive Media Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards 2012.  Award winners were selected by 2,500 financial market professionals surveyed by Incisive Media.

Best Evaluated Prices Service Provider
A wide range of buy- and sell-side institutions select Markit’s evaluated pricing service for its use of multiple sources of high quality, observable market data and transparent methodology for valuing bonds and structured products.  Over the past year, Markit has significantly expanded its evaluated bonds service which now prices 2.5 million securities per day, including corporate, government, sovereign, agency and municipal bonds, a recent addition to the service.  In 2011, the company launched Markit Fair Value, an independent and fully outsourced service that helps US mutual funds and other institutional investors estimate a bond’s price outside active trading hours more effectively. 

Best Reference Data Provider
Markit has been providing leading reference data solutions for the past decade, notably Markit RED, an industry standard for legally verified reference entity identification for credit default swaps.  Leveraging its expertise in the credit markets, Markit continues to expand its reference data products and services and has become the trusted source for analysing complex corporate events and their impact on related entities and instruments.  With a focus on multi-asset class solutions for instruments, issuers and identifiers to increase transparency across the entire entity capital structure, Markit is committed to delivering innovative solutions to meet its customers’ reference data needs.

Armins Rusis, Global Head of Data, Indices and Research at Markit, said: “Accurate pricing and reliable reference data are critical to the way the industry manages risk and regulatory reporting and we are pleased that our products and services are so widely embraced.  Another strength of our service is that we provide a range of supporting data, like liquidity scores, alongside pricing to give our clients more market insights and context for valuations.”

Now in their tenth year, the Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards recognise industry excellence within market data, reference data and enterprise data management.