Waters Rankings 2022: Best alternative data provider—FactSet

Overview

FactSet delivers content, analytics, and flexible technology to help more than 171,000 users and is committed to helping clients navigate the challenges of working with structured and unstructured content in many ways. The firm has focused its innovation and investment on expanding its breadth of alternative data to support its clients’ most sophisticated strategies.

The Solution

Leveraging alternative data to find signals and uncover risk: FactSet’s alternative data helps users understand portfolio exposure and maintain performance by uncovering opportunities such as geographical revenue exposures and supply chain connections. Users can instantly evaluate datasets and build investment applications in a fully hosted environment.

Secret Sauce

While alternative data provides enlightening insights, it is also voluminous, unstructured and complex. With 40-plus years of integration experience, FactSet connects financial data across listings, securities, entities, people and funds. It offers connected content from FactSet and third-party providers alongside programming tools.

Recent Milestones

• The acquisition of BTU Analytics, a provider of data and analytics in the North American renewables, power, oil, and natural gas sectors
• The integration of FactSet’s data-mapping service into Snowflake’s platform, providing clients with faster content integration 
• The expansion of FactSet’s API offering to support its clients’ growing programmatic needs

Future Objectives

FactSet has focused its innovation and strategic investment on expanding the breadth of its content—collected by FactSet and integrated from third parties—to provide support for its clients’ most sophisticated investment strategies. This includes enhanced data in alternative and private markets, industry-specific deep-sector metrics, and real-time ESG intelligence.