Best Alternative Data Initiative: FactSet

The award for Best Alternative Data Initiative this year goes to FactSet, which has positioned itself as an integral part of the growing alternative data movement with its Open:FactSet Marketplace. Judges praised FactSet’s approach of carefully gauging customer demand before developing a service with a sandbox for clients to “try before they buy”, easing adoption of alternative data and time-to-market.

“We met with over 100 clients to better understand their challenges with identifying, integrating and analyzing alternative data, which helped us pinpoint the product that was needed. We found they needed more diverse datasets, but were struggling to find providers that met the rigorous standards of the financial industry,” says Rich Newman, global head of the content and technology solutions group at FactSet. 

Armed with this insight, FactSet began developing the Open:FactSet Marketplace, an online ecosystem leveraging FactSet’s symbology and concordance to connect its data with carefully screened third-party providers. 

“During the research phase, the challenge wasn’t finding data firms eager to partner with FactSet, but prioritizing them. We identified and explored more than 500 potential providers and ranked them based on their relevance to clients’ needs, data quality, subject matter expertise and synergy with existing FactSet solutions,” says Newman.

In April 2018, FactSet launched the Open:FactSet Marketplace with 25 datafeeds of FactSet’s core and alternative data, and data from third-party providers, including Alexandria Technology, Estimize, Prattle, RepRisk and Truvalue Labs, among others.

The service has now grown to offer more than 60 datafeeds with alternative content from companies including Mastercard, Thasos and IHS Markit—all stitched together with FactSet symbology. FactSet works with all providers to review and integrate their data before making it available, so users can seamlessly link datafeeds to their models, systems and proprietary datasets.

In July 2018, FactSet launched Data Exploration, which combines the Microsoft Azure cloud with data in the Open:FactSet Marketplace to offer users instant access to explore data in a fully hosted environment. Data Exploration eliminates the cost of trialing data locally by providing everything needed to analyze new content with a simple log-in, Newman says.

Since then, FactSet has introduced a Community Forum and also a Candidate Program, which allows clients to discover and evaluate potential new datasets before they become available as fully integrated products on the marketplace. All candidate providers are screened by FactSet before being accepted into the program. Newman says: “Open:FactSet Marketplace has been one of FactSet’s most successful and exhilarating releases and it has created incredible energy—both internally and in our clients.” 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners