Best Data Analytics Provider: FactSet

FactSet retains its crown in the data analytics space after being named Best Data Analytics Provider for the fourth consecutive year. A vendor’s ability to hold its spot in a competitive market speaks volumes about its ability to innovate and create products that continuously help clients to drive productivity and performance. This award also marks a double win for FactSet at this year’s Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards, with its other in the Best Alternative Data Initiative category.

The company has evolved over the past 40 years from starting as a printed report—Company FactSet—to today providing more than 115,000 users worldwide with integrated data and analytics solutions across the investment life cycle. It first entered the portfolio management and analytics space in 1997 with the release of its Portfolio Analysis product. Since then it has expanded its product range with the overall aim of ensuring data is placed in context, with value-adding analytics layered on top.

“One area we targeted in 2018 was the development of key features for portfolio construction and management. This included enhancing and bringing our advanced risk analytics in real-time to the portfolio manager, through both new analytics models and a new Portfolio Manager Platform,” says Rob Robie, head of analytics and trading solutions at FactSet. 

Other key enhancements over the past year have included the availability of more exchange-traded fund (ETF) data and analytics, a new universal screening application, which integrates ETFs alongside equity, debt and activism data, improved search and analysis tools for company filings, and the addition of a wide range of new data sources—from US bank regulatory financial data to reputational risk data, including environmental, social and governance risk research and analytics on more than 110,000 public and private companies from developed and emerging markets. 

The company also launched a cloud-based data testing platform, FactSet Data Exploration, which allows users to evaluate datasets and build investment applications using industry-standard programming languages in a fully hosted environment provided by Microsoft Azure. 

This year, the company will continue to enhance both its risk and fixed-income analytics, Robie says. FactSet is also focused on enhancements that ‘connect the dots’ between content sets and surfacing insights for its users. 

“Over the next 12 to 24 months, we are going to be very aggressive in terms of how we use our engines to derive and surface information that a user may not necessarily look for on their own,” Robie says. “Having advanced analytics gives us that capability, and we will align that with technologies such as advanced application programming interfaces and machine learning through open ecosystems to do this.” 

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