State Street Corporation has acquired PriceStats, which collects online prices for millions of products sold by more than 1,500 retailers around the world, as rapidly changing inflation has become a challenge for economies and investors.

In November this year State Street said in a statement that it had acquired PriceStats, whose data provides insights into inflation trends and purchasing power that complement traditional government indicators. Will Kinlaw, head of State Street Data Intelligence, told Markets Media that the firm sees a gap in the provision of high quality alternative economic data.

“State Street is the only firm of our size and reach that is investing in this space, so we do see an opening,” he added. “We intend to continue building on the great work that PriceStats has done over the years.”

Kinlaw said State Street has been working with PriceStats since the data provider launched in 2011. The data has become increasingly popular with State Street’s clients as it has become more mainstream for investors to ingest advanced and alternative data sets.

PriceStats will become part of the new State Street Data Intelligence unit, which also includes private capital indices  and analytics, as well as media sentiment analysis.

“in the last five years that has really accelerated and asset managers are creating entire organizations focused on sourcing the best data for their investment professionals,” Kinlaw added. “The resurgence in inflation after the pandemic led to this capability becoming more interesting to clients.”

In addition, policymakers are also increasingly adopting alternative economic data as a complement to government data as it can be published more quickly and more frequently.

Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve said in a press conference on 29 October 2025 that the U.S central bank was using PriceStats as one of tis sources to track inflation during the U.S government shutdown. Powell said: “It doesn’t replace the government data, but it gives us a picture. I think if something material were happening, we would pick that up.”

Growth

State Street realized that PriceStats had reached a certain maturity, and that by investing, they could take the data provider to the  “next level,” according to Kinlaw. He argued that differentiators for PriceStats are its “phenomenal” talent and the long history of its data.

Kinlaw described Alberto Cavallo, co-founder of PriceStats alongside Pilar Iglesias, as an expert in inflation, so State Street wanted to keep Cavallo involved.

Cavallo is the Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and will remain as an academic partner of State Street Associates, He will also partner with State Street to develop additional products focused on high-speed measurement of the real economy.

PriceStats’ data goes back to before the global financial crisis, which Kinlaw described as an “eternity” in the alternative data space. This gives clients the ability to test frameworks and understand how the data works.

State Street will invest in PriceStats as the firm sees a lot of opportunity to do more with inflation, and also sees the opportunity to use the data and technology and go beyond inflation, and to increase distribution. For example, a real wages data set could give investors a sense of how wages are changing and how much of that is driven by inflation. Clients also ask for specific price series, such as for washing machines, which are a good indicator of the impact of tariffs. State Street is also interested in marrying consumer transaction data with price data.

PriceStats’ data covers 27 countries, most of the developed and emerging markets that State Street clients are focused on, but that could be expanded as long as the firm can collect enough data to  cover a sufficient share of the consumer basket in that country. In the U.S. State Street currently offers breakdowns of sectors such as food and beverages and apparel, which could be extended to other countries.

Private markets

Kinlaw argued that State Street has an advantage in being able to provide clients with a unique perspective from anonymising and aggregating data the firm collects across its business lines.

For example, State Street’s private capital indices  cover data across more than $6 trillion in committed capital that is serviced by the firm to provide performance measurement services to investors in an aggregated and anonymized way.

“Clients can get a top down view of that space and customize those benchmarks,” said Kinlaw. “it gives them a perspective that they would not otherwise have.”

By capturing private markets data directly from funds and investors every day, Kinlaw said State Street can provide an earlier view of what is happening.

“We are piggybacking off our performance business which maintains high quality data that needs to be properly classified and labeled,” added Kinlaw. “We are able to build on that very clean data set to offer our suite of benchmarks.”

He stressed that the benchmarks are derived from aggregated and anonymized data without violating confidentiality or privacy.