The 2017 Tech 40: Mike Chinn

The buzz around big data and analytics is music to Mike Chinn's ears. He is president of S&P Global Market Intelligence, a $1.6 billion-in-revenue division of S&P Global that was built to capitalize on the seemingly insatiable demand for financial data, market signals, and insights. Reflecting on the implications of data and analytics on business, Chinn says, "It means everything and nothing. A spreadsheet is data. A model that gets you to a decision is analytics." Given the ubiquity of data and how quickly the ability to aggregate and analyze it has evolved, value increasingly lies in asking the "right questions," says Chinn. He has led S&P Global Market Intelligence since September 2015, when McGraw Hill Financial acquired SNL Financial for $2.2 billion and combined the information provider with its S&P Capital IQ business. Chinn, 45, was president and CEO of SNL Financial prior to the purchase. He's partly focused on "widening the moat around unique and proprietary data sets and finding new ones." Despite the trend toward open availability and democratization of data, there are still opportunities to gain proprietary data, and to profit handsomely from it.