S&P Global is an American publicly traded corporation, an institution headquartered in Manhattan, New York, that provides financial information, analytics, and intelligence across global capital and commodity markets. Its primary function is to offer "Essential Intelligence" through world-leading benchmarks, data, and insights to help businesses, governments, and individuals make decisions. The company's roots trace back to Henry Varnum Poor's 1860 railroad manuals, which aimed to provide financial information on companies. The modern entity was formed when Poor's Publishing and the Standard Statistics Bureau merged in 1941 to become Standard & Poor's Corp., solving the problem of fragmented financial data by consolidating it.
S&P Global operates through several key divisions, which act as its mechanism for delivering services. S&P Global Ratings is a major credit rating agency that publishes financial research and assigns credit ratings to stocks, bonds, and commodities. S&P Dow Jones Indices is a joint venture that calculates over 830,000 indices, including the globally recognized S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Other divisions include S&P Global Market Intelligence for multi-asset-class data and analytics, and S&P Global Energy (formerly Platts) for commodities and energy intelligence.
S&P Global connects directly to the Indian economy through its ownership of the Indian credit rating agency CRISIL. The company was formerly known as McGraw Hill Financial, Inc. until it rebranded to S&P Global in 2016 to unify its offerings. A significant recent change occurred in February 2022 with the merger with IHS Markit, which materially reshaped the company into a broader data and analytics platform. Additionally, in July 2026, S&P Global completed the spin-off of its S&P Global Mobility division into an independent public company, Mobility Global (NYSE: MBGL), while providing recast financial results to reflect this change.