WatersTechnology Asia Awards 2020: Best Data Analytics Solution—FactSet

FactSet wins the best data analytics solution category in the inaugural WatersTechnology Asia Awards, thanks to its FactSet Workstation offering. This win comes on the back of a number of similar awards in other WatersTechnology awards programs: The Norwalk, Conn.-based vendor won the best data provider to the sell side in this year’s Sell-Side Technology Awards, while in this year’s Waters Rankings, it won the best alternative data provider and best reporting system provider categories.

The FactSet Workstation provides users with a platform for data integration and analytics, allowing them to feed the solution with their own proprietary data as well as market data from a variety of third-party providers. Users can then use the workstation for company, industry and overall portfolio analysis.

FactSet has had a presence in the region for 25 years and is known for delivering content, analytics and technology to its growing list of clients. Tom Griffiths, senior vice president, senior director of sales and client solutions for Asia-Pacific, describes how FactSet takes a “client-centric” approach, collaborating to help them work more efficiently and to make more informed investment decisions. With ever-changing client needs, FactSet has evolved its own business and technology solutions to help meet those needs.

FactSet has made significant enhancements to its content and analytics offering over the past twelve months, advancing the functionality of its technology and integrating new data sources. Griffiths describes how the firm focuses its efforts on “bringing together disparate content sets onto one platform to deliver consistent data and analytics across various client workflows.”

He cites some of FactSet’s clients’ greatest challenges right now as integrating multiple data management systems, co-mingling disparate content, and consuming alternative datasets in order to drive alpha generation in a global, multi-asset class construct.

The FactSet Workstation is a platform designed to allow users to work with multiple datasets across multiple workflows in a single, consolidated system. Griffiths also mentions the importance of moving data to the cloud, into open-source environments and other technologies to keep businesses running efficiently and reducing their total cost of ownership.

He explains that “FactSet will continue to invest in an open technology framework that allows us to integrate within our clients’ environments across a number of different workflow scenarios (i.e., digital portals, data lakes/warehouses and cloud-based infrastructure). In addition, our open API framework will continue to enable clients to integrate data and analytics into internal and third-party database environments to provide consistency across various teams,” he says.