S&P Global puts Capital IQ and its data businesses up for a possible separation

S&P Global has opened a strategic review, including a possible separation, of Capital IQ and the data businesses attached to it, which together make up most of the Kensho Data & Platforms unit inside its Market Intelligence division. Chief executive Martina Cheung said the data businesses include financials, SNL and Visible Alpha. The company expects to keep Enterprise Solutions, RatingsDirect and RatingsXpress, but the exact boundary of what is under review has not been settled. There is no timetable and no assurance of any transaction, and the company's guidance for the year assumes Market Intelligence stays as it is. Cheung said the earliest meaningful update would probably come on the February earnings call.

What makes the review matter to a holder is the shape of the company that would remain. In the September 2026 quarter Market Intelligence brought in about a third of S&P Global's segment revenue but less than a quarter of its adjusted segment operating profit, calculated from the segment tables in the results. Its adjusted operating margin, calculated the same way, was 36.2%, against 53.5% for the group as a whole. Both are adjusted measures, as the company labels them.

Taken together, Ratings, Indices and Energy earned an adjusted margin of 62.5% on the same basis. That figure is not a forecast of what would remain. It sits before corporate costs, it assumes all of Market Intelligence leaves when the company plans to keep parts of it, and it ignores any shared costs that would stay behind with the remaining group. The business under review is also not yet a known quantity: asked about its growth and margin, Cheung said it was too early to discuss them because the boundary first had to be fixed.

The review reaches further into the division than management had pointed to before. In October 2025 it described a multi-year clean-up of the Market Intelligence portfolio as substantially complete. In July 2026, after reorganising the division, management said its Platforms business, which includes Capital IQ, was growing at a low single-digit rate in aggregate, while Kensho's data feeds grew faster, and that small carve-outs were possible. Now Capital IQ itself, with its associated data businesses, is under review, though the company expects to keep RatingsDirect, which sits in Platforms. Management presents the step as continuity rather than a new direction: "we did not announce a change in the strategy for S&P Global," Cheung said. The company's case is that separate ownership could give Capital IQ and its data businesses dedicated investment and focus.

The quarter also shows where the remaining group's growth is coming from, and it is not mainly the largest division. Adjusted segment operating profit rose by $147m from a year earlier. Indices supplied $73m of that, about half, calculated from the segment tables. Ratings, which produced the biggest slice of segment profit, added only $4m.

None of the review is in the outlook yet, and the outlook went up again. The company now guides adjusted margin expansion of 125 to 150 basis points for the year, excluding OSTTRA, a business it divested late last year; in April that range was 50 to 75 basis points. It raised its adjusted earnings-per-share guidance to $17.70 to $17.95, from $17.50 to $17.75 in July, and it still expects to buy back more than $7 billion of its shares this year. All of that assumes Market Intelligence as it is structured today.

So holders can see the direction of the change but not its size. A group without Capital IQ would lean further on Ratings and Indices, the two divisions with the highest margins last quarter, and the revenue, growth and profit of what would leave are still to be set out, on management's account no earlier than February.