Sell-Side Technology Awards 2025: Best data provider to the sell side—FactSet

Overview

FactSet is a market data provider serving both sides of the financial services industry, offering analytics, services, content, and technology that enable rapid opportunity identification and capitalization. The firm addresses various investment banking challenges, allowing sell-side personnel to draw insights from content and providing them with productivity tools so that they can focus on higher-value tasks. FactSet’s technology stack is designed to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, chat tools, and banking technologies, enhancing productivity and decision-making across the sell side.

The solution  

FactSet delivers a single, integrated user experience across research, modeling, and pitchbook creation. The platform automates processes to eliminate various onerous tasks, enhancing efficiency in modeling and reporting with MS Office tools. Integrated generative AI technology accelerates insight discovery (with FactSet Mercury) and automates modeling and presentation creation tasks (with Pitch Creator), while an open ecosystem allows flexible content consumption via workstations, datafeeds, API, digital, and CRM solutions, making FactSet instrumental in streamlining operations and informed decision-making.

Secret sauce  

FactSet differentiates itself by offering a range of content, including public and private markets and deep sector data. Its solutions, like the Office Productivity Suite and AI-Powered Comps, streamline pitchbook creation and idea-generation for users. The AI-driven Pitch Creator automates manually intensive tasks, freeing bankers to focus on higher-value activities and drive revenue growth. FactSet Mercury enhances decision-making through instant insights from complex data, boosting productivity and efficiency.

Recent milestones

• GenAI capabilities: Pitch Creator streamlines pitchbook data tasks with tools like ReSlide and Chart Creator, while FactSet Mercury offers a chatbot for fast, transparent insights from diverse datasets.
• Private markets coverage: Expanded data includes 9.5 million private companies, detailed financials, and information on 25,000 general partners and 500,000 transactions.
• Deep sector research: Delivers over 2 million data points across global content sets in banking, insurance, real estate, energy, media, telecom, and specialty finance

Future objectives

• Enhanced GenAI development: FactSet will continue to build solutions that answer critical questions, automate tasks, and boost clients’ GenAI initiatives with curated data packages and chatbots.
• FactSet Meeting Edge will deliver meeting preparation dossiers via FactSet, email, Teams, or CRM systems to provide bankers with expertise-driven insights for impactful client meetings.
• Deep sector investment will focus on providing differentiated content, research and insights across more than 10 sectors.

Why they won

FactSet continues its impressive run of form in these and other WatersTechnology awards by winning the prized best data provider to the sell side category, thanks to its outstanding FactSet Sell-Side Workstation and Productivity Suite. These days, firms on both sides of the industry are looking to third-party vendors for more than standalone technologies and datasets—they now expect a range of ancillary services and potentially transformational tools around the primary products or datasets they buy, thus creating something of a mini-ecosystem with the view to optimizing the various processes touched by those services and maximizing their impact of the business. 

To that end, FactSet’s Sell-Side Workstation and Productivity Suite offers users GenAI technology that enhances their insight discovery through FactSet Mercury and automates modeling and presentation functions through Pitch Creator, while content is available via a range of mechanisms, including workstations, datafeeds, APIs and CRM platforms. There is little doubt that FactSet has been listening to the market and providing clients with exactly what they need to optimize business and operational processes, a notion underlined by this win.