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.
 1. Adena Friedman NASDAQ  2. Catherine Bessant Bank of America Corp.  3. Robert Goldstein BlackRock  4. Jeffrey Sprecher Intercontinental Exchange  5. Lance Uggla IHS Markit |
 6. Shawn Edwards & Vlad Kliatchko Bloomberg  7. David Craig Thomson Reuters  8. Michael Spencer NEX Group  9. Don Callahan Citigroup  10. Elisha Wiesel Goldman Sachs Group |
 11. Michael Bodson Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.  12. Terrence Duffy CME Group  13. Charles Li Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing  14. Sean Belka Fidelity Investments  15. Chris Concannon CBOE Holdings |
 16. Guy Chiarello First Data Corp.  17. Steven Lieblich Citadel  18. David Rutter R3CEV  19. Blythe Masters Digital Asset Holdings  20. Alfred Spector Two Sigma Investments |
 21. Neil Katz D.E. Shaw Group  22. Lee Olesky Tradeweb Markets  23. Richard McVey MarketAxess Holdings  24. David Gledhill DBS Bank  25. Seth Merrin Liquidnet Holdings |
 26. Antoine Shagoury State Street Corp.  27. Peter Brown & Robert Mercer Renaissance Technologies  28. Lou Eccleston TMX Group  29. Peter Cherecwich Northern Trust Corp.  30. Mike Chinn S&P Global Market Intelligence |
 31. Chris Corrado London Stock Exchange Group  32. Neal Pawar AQR Capital Management  33. Gary Norcross Fidelity National Information Services  34. Steven O'Hanlon Numerix  35. Sebastián Ceria Axioma |
 36. Brian Conlon First Derivatives and Kx Systems  37. Tyler Kim MaplesFS  38. Michael Cooper BT Radianz  39. Robert Schifellite Broadridge Financial Solutions  40. Jim Minnick eVestment |