Believe it or not, a time once existed when investors couldn’t look up the movement of any financial instruments without knowing only the first initial of the company name or ticker.

As recently as the early 2000s, the majority of people still turned to the daily newspaper’s finance section to quickly scan PepsiCo’s (PEP) stock price on the Nasdaq.

Then, as Google’s search engine powers began to spread between 2002 and 2004, so did consumer expectations to have instant digital access to anything, regardless of correctly inputted names and spellings. Google became the first web engine to provide smart auto-fill predictions — called “type-ahead search” — as users began typing out search queries in 2004.

Around the same time, the finance industry wanted in, hoping to make searching for General Electric (GE) pricing data as easy as looking up ski conditions.

But introducing these same technical capabilities in finance meant building a tool that cross-referenced thousands of databases in order to return a result in milliseconds, said Meredith Chavel of IHS Markit Digital.

“Our industry has hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways to label each investment instrument,” Chavel said. It would take highly sophisticated technology to meet the demand — a challenge that Chavel and her colleagues were up for. 

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have a front-row seat to see it come to fruition for our clients in financial services,” Chavel said. 

In addition to this creation and iteration of this tool, she’s also had a front-row seat to the massive growth IHS Markit Digital has experienced since she started there more than 13 years ago as a business development associate.

Today, she leads as chief information officer.

From startup to a publically traded corporation, Chavel said the company has grown into its own with an eye for design and a knack for proprietary technology under IHS Markit’s longstanding history of providing data and analytics to more than 50,000 global customers.

Chavel takes Built In Colorado through her journey. 

Let’s begin with how the company has changed since you started. What growth have you seen?

Chavel: I found my position on Craigslist and joined a 200-person startup called Wall Street On Demand in 2006, which Markit acquired in 2010 and then went public on NASDAQ in 2014. Markit and IHS merged in 2016, and last year we changed our listing to NYSE. Just these transactions alone have been a wild ride.

At the same time, our responsibilities within Markit Digital have grown and our perspective has changed from a focus on any one project to trends that are influencing and shaping our industry. 

I’ve watched colleagues of mine move from entry roles to greater responsibility at Markit Digital, global roles within IHS Markit and positions of influence at our clients. 

The type-ahead search function occurred early on in your career. Looking back, how did this project kick-off?

Chavel: Our design team first looked at what our users expected to see when they began typing. Did they expect a security to be returned, like Microsoft, or are they expecting a ticker symbol, like MSFT? Are they expecting news stories or research reports to populate? This helped us define what databases we would include initially from a technical perspective.

In less than six months, we started with the simplest implementation: pulling company names and tickers and used one cross-reference database called xREF so that when users typed in Microsoft, they could see information from the different providers, even if they didn’t label it exactly as Microsoft. 

How has this function changed since that initial rollout?

We’ve reiterated and added databases hundreds of times over the years because the complexity rises with every new implementation. What we do for each client is unique to what data they have licensed and how their users are interacting with the site. There’s an element of configuration every time we do it, but the type-ahead search tool is now part of every single implementation we do.

Today, users can look up just Microsoft or they can request all the stocks that outperformed their 52-week high — or large-cap stocks that have a buy rating — and get results instantaneously within the interface. We can also now pull results from news or research reports in addition to company names.

What role did Google’s type-ahead technology play in the design of Markit Digital’s? 

We looked to them from a competitive perspective on the user interface side, but not from the technology perspective. How they were doing it almost wouldn’t have applied to what we needed to do because of the different types of data we were looking at. At the time, we also had a couple of competitors in the United States, but none of them were as technologically advanced as we were to deliver results in milliseconds. 

Can you elaborate on Markit Digital’s tech? What makes it unique in the space?

When we were first founded, the types of technology we needed didn’t quite exist yet, so we had to build it ourselves. Obviously, technology has changed quite a bit in 25 years, so now we integrate a number of third-party components to our platform, like Google Apigee. But the majority of our platform is built on proprietary technology. In fact, one of our clients once called us the original fintech.