S&P Global strikes a $1.8 billion deal for private-markets data firm With Intelligence

S&P Global strikes a $1.8 billion deal for private-markets data firm With Intelligence

A Strategic Move into Private Markets Data

S&P Global’s acquisition of With Intelligence for $1.8 billion marks a significant leap into the private-markets ecosystem.

The deal combines S&P’s legacy in public-markets data, ratings and indices with With Intelligence’s proprietary alternative-assets analytics and benchmarks.

With alternative assets expected to approach $40 trillion by the decade’s end, S&P is positioning itself at the centre of the shift from public to private.

This transaction reflects how data and intelligence are becoming the new battleground in financial services, where firms seek to own not just pricing, but insights into flows, fund behaviour and deal-making.

Deal Details: Scope, Rationale and Integration

With Intelligence, founded in 1998, serves roughly 3,000 clients globally and is projected to generate about $130 million in revenue for 2025.

The acquisition is expected to close in late 2025 or early 2026 and to be slightly earnings dilutive in the short-term but accretive by 2027.

According to Reuters, ““S&P Global strikes a $1.8 billion deal for private-markets firm With Intelligence”. By integrating With Intelligence’s data, covering 30K investors, 70K funds, 350K deals, S&P intends to deliver end-to-end visibility across the alternatives lifecycle: from fund-raising to exit.

Why Private Markets Are the New Frontier

The surge in private-equity, private-credit and infrastructure investments is driving demand for deeper, real-time analytics.

Traditionally opaque, these segments now require benchmarking, performance data and transparency.

A report from Financial Times observed that “the acquisition marks S&P’s push beyond public markets toward private-asset intelligence”.

With public-market exits slowing and institutional investors seeking diversification, firms like S&P are pivoting their business model toward data services that support private-asset allocation, monitoring and risk management.

The With Intelligence deal thus signals a broader transformation in how investment firms source and consume data.

Market Implications and Competitive Landscape

The transaction places S&P in direct competition with other data aggregators and index providers expanding into alternatives.

With Intelligence’s workflow tools, benchmarks and investor-manager relationships will enable S&P to offer a differentiated platform.

The deal also underscores the rising valuation of data businesses in finance: access to unique datasets and proprietary insights is becoming a major competitive advantage.

Institutional clients will increasingly demand not only pricing, but predictive intelligence, how funds behave, where deal-flow pipelines sit, and how returns evolve across cycles.

This shift could reshape how asset-management firms operate and how mid-market deals are priced.

Investor Takeaways – What to Watch Going Forward

For investors in S&P Global, key metrics will include the pace of revenue integration, margin expansion in the Market Intelligence segment, and how quickly the firm cross-sells With Intelligence’s offerings into its client base.

Observing how S&P captures contract value growth from high-teens bookings at With Intelligence will be crucial. More broadly, this acquisition highlights the increasing importance of data monetisation in finance, suggesting that successful firms will not only rate bonds or calculate indices, they will predict investment behaviour.

As alternatives continue to grow, the next wave of returns may go to those who unlock insights, not just capital.