Asia Awards 2023: Best alternative data provider—FactSet

Overview

Investors are increasingly buying more ESG data to satisfy a growing number of ESG workflows, including new regulatory disclosure requirements. Sophisticated ESG strategies typically require content sets from multiple vendors encompassing raw metrics, ratings or scores, climate analytics, and business exposure, across multiple asset classes. This presents significant data management issues as investors struggle to stitch together content sets, integrate them into the investment process, and customize their investment approach.

The solution

FactSet helps eliminate what it calls ESG “blind spots” by providing much of the data required for a fit-for-purpose ESG investment approach. This data is connected to a single security/entity master and is available via the FactSet Workstation, feeds and APIs. FactSet supports flexible and scalable ESG workflows, including portfolio construction, analysis and reporting (client and regulatory).

Secret sauce

• The Truvalue product suite exposes the external stakeholder view of ESG performance through scores and spotlight events, with transparency into the underlying articles. This content tracks more than 260,000 public and private entities to capture positive and negative ESG information from over 100,000 sources. 
• FactSet provides transparency into business exposure captured by industry experts standardizing as-reported business segments. It also features detailed supply chain relationship information. 
• FactSet offers users access to a library of connected third-party ESG content.

Recent milestones

• Launched the FactSet SFDR Principal Adverse Impact dataset alongside a Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) regulatory reporting solution that allows clients to select the vendor (FactSet, MSCI, ISS or other) of their choosing to support regulatory reporting functions
• Released an ESG report in the FactSet Workstation that enables the comparison of ESG metrics across vendors for individual companies
• The Truvalue platform is now available through the FactSet Workstation or can be embedded into client portals or applications via FactSet Views.

Future objectives

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

Why they won

FactSet wins the best alternative data provider category in this year’s WatersTechnology Asia Awards on the back of its Truvalue offering, a data service it subsumed through its acquisition of Truvalue Labs at the tail end of 2020. The Truevalue suite focuses more on ESG data than traditional alternative data, although that delineation misses the point: It is a genuinely valuable source of information for ESG-driven strategies, tracking 260,000 public and private entities with the aim of capturing positive and negative ESG information from over 100,000 sources.