Financial Data & Credit Analytics
The buyer population — Other financial investment activities
Base industry report for 5239 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 12,360
- Under 10 employeesA
- 89%
- Establishments · USA
- 83,954
- Employment · USA
- 620,457
- Payroll · USA
- $157.7B
Of 12,360 Canadian establishments with employees, 89% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators. Each of those is one potential account, before any filter for size or fit.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Find something that compounds. Entry is achievable and so is the first customer; what is missing is a reason the next entrant cannot repeat it as easily as you did.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 7
The binding constraint — defensibility
The moat here is legal as well as commercial: credit ratings used for regulatory capital purposes must come from a designated agency (NRSRO in the US, equivalent recognition elsewhere), and that designation is not obtainable by a startup. The adjacent data and analytics businesses are defended by decades of accumulated proprietary history that cannot be back-filled. This is the clearest example in this research of a market where the barrier is a licence somebody else already holds. Sourced update: S&P Global's Market Intelligence segment alone is a $4.92B business and Moody's Analytics is now 97% recurring — an entrant is not selling data into a gap but into two subscription estates that already own the workflow.
The incumbent
Who owns this market and who is coming for it. Fields a screen never reached say so rather than guessing.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 3 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 3 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P Global (Market Intelligence)NYSE: SPGIB | $4.9B | — | 2025 segment revenue |
| Moody's (Analytics)B | not disclosed | — | Segment grew 9% with 97% recurring; the absolute figure in circulation does not reconcile and is not used |
| Bloomberg / LSEG / FactSet / MorningstarC | not disclosed | — | Not researched for this record |
Startups & challengers
Newer and smaller vendors going at the incumbent — funded challengers first. Named, not researched to the depth of the field above; a company with a page here links to it.
| Company | Stage | What it does | Raised |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blooma | Startup | AI underwriting and portfolio monitoring for commercial real estate lenders | — |
Evidence
Evidence. Incumbent financials on this record ARE sourced (tier A/B, see the financials block). The cut factor and reasoning remain analyst judgment and were not tested against customers.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Industry body for market-data vendors, exchanges and consumer firms; runs WFIC and city events including FISD Toronto (18 Nov 2026). No member count stated
Professional body for credit managers; grants the CCP designation and runs a member discussion board. No member count stated
Risk-management professional body (FRM certification); its site calls itself the largest community of risk leaders, no number stated
FISD's biennial market-data conference; 11-14 Oct 2026, Copenhagen; 'more than 700 industry peers' per the SIIA event listing
Quantitative-finance forum; homepage stats show 113,196 total members, 101,499 topics and 882,511 posts
Financial-technology trade title covering market data, reference data and vendor M&A
Trade publisher for financial data management and regtech; runs the Data Management Summit series
r/quant and r/CFA could not be confirmed from this network and are not listed.