Sell-Side Technology Awards 2024: Best data provider to the sell side—FactSet

Overview

FactSet delivers analytics, services, content, and technology to help sell-side firms globally capitalize on business opportunities. It helps sell-side practitioners draw insights from relevant content; equips analysts with efficiency tools so they can devote time to higher-value tasks; and provides firms with a technology stack that integrates with CRM systems, chat tools, and other key banking technologies.

The solution  

FactSet’s areas of expertise span research, idea generation, due diligence, modeling, valuation, and pitchbook creation. It provides users with process automation tools that eliminate redundant tasks. Its Office Productivity Suite drives efficiency in modeling and reporting; its integrated generative AI technology helps users identify insights; and its open ecosystem allows users to consume content flexibly via the FactSet Workstation, datafeeds, APIs, digital, and CRM solutions.

Secret sauce  

FactSet’s solutions are underpinned by its high-quality data/content, from core financials and street estimates to transactions and capital markets data. It delivers unique content sets with a particular focus on private markets and deep-sector data, while its Productivity Suite automates and streamlines the time-consuming pitchbook creation process. AI-powered comparable company analyses (comps) allow users to compare more than 3 million public and private companies to drive idea generation.

Recent milestones

• AI-driven comps: Allow users to generate comparable company analysis for over 3 million public and private companies to drive idea generation
• Generative AI capabilities: Transcript Assistant allows users to leverage two-way chat to glean insights from transcripts.
• FactSet’s deep sector data enables deep research.
• Global content sets across banks, insurance, real estate, metals and mining, energy, media and telecoms, and specialty finance
• Integration of more than 2 million data points, over 200,000 assets, and more than 40,000 public/private financials

Future objectives

• Deep sector: FactSet is planning additional investment into more than 10 sectors.
• Private markets: The company will expand global private markets coverage; enrich profiles with differentiated content, including people contact data, estimated financials, comparable companies, and industry tagging; and it will build screening tools to power idea generation.
• Generative AI: FactSet will continue to build genAI solutions to save users time and allow them to make more informed decisions through mile-wide discoverability, mile-deep workflow automation and mile-high innovation acceleration.

Why they won

It seems FactSet can’t stop winning WatersTechnology awards, and for good reason: The Norwalk, Conn.-based data specialist continues to push the boundaries of industry-specific data and content, with a special focus on deep sector, ESG, and private markets data. But curating and delivering data to customers is only half the challenge—the other half centers on ensuring that the data is clean, fresh, transparent, and delivered in formats specified by clients. It is here where FactSet differentiates itself, taking care of all the heavy lifting associated with content collation and data delivery, allowing its clients to focus on making the most informed business decisions confident that each decision is repeatable, explainable and defendable.