The rise of the IT industry has given great opportunities to other fields to level up their game using technology and remain up to date and relevant in today’s changing trends. Thus from hospital industries to aviation, from hospitality to finance, every field has opted to include technology to achieve the required growth in lesser time.
Talking about the finance industry, there has been a rise in the number of fintech companies as well and companies that provide software solutions to such companies. FactSet Research Systems Inc. falls into the latter category, a financial data, and software company that chose a traditional way of working in the beginning, but today is offering services based on the latest technologies. The company is about more than forty years old, but it has tried to walk with the changing trends, and thus, today is known as one of the leading financial data and software companies.
About The Company
Howard Wille and Charles Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The company is an American financial services company, with its headquarters based in Norwalk, Connecticut, United States. The company is responsible for data integrations, large-scale transitions, reporting, and research analysis, API integration, index services, portfolio data management, etc. It is a publically traded company and trades with the symbol FDS on New York Stock Exchange. In the past 43 years, FactSet has reached 22 countries and has set up offices in 48 different locations. It has over 10000 people working for it globally and made annual revenues worth US$1.49 billion in the financial year 2020. With high revenues in 2020, FactSet became a unicorn 2020.
Founding FactSet
Howard Wille and Chuck Snyder founded FactSet in 1978. The two co-founders used to be co-workers at Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, Wall Street. At the beginning of the 70s, computers became quite popular for office work, and with the acquisition of Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan by Shearson, the two thought of founding a company of their own that would directly sell user data to their clients. Hence in 1978, they founded FactSet, a company that began with delivering data on paper to the clients under the program, “Company FactSet”.
During the early 80s, FactSet offered its clients the option to download data directly to their spreadsheets, making the process simpler for the clients. In 1989, the company also started a new and advanced service with the name Private Database Service. The service helped users directly include the proprietary data into their research information.
In the next decade, Company released its software for Windows operating system and expanded overseas by establishing offices in countries like London and Tokyo. During the mid-90s, the company was serving the top investment managers in the US. In 1995, FactSet was renamed FactSet Research Systems Inc., and the next year, it went public on NYSE in 1996. In further years, the company released platforms like Portfolio Management Workstation, Economic Analysis, and Company Explorer. Along with those platforms, it also introduced the DIRECTIONS interface and Online Assistant for those platforms. It also started a 24*7 customer care telephone service in 1999.
In the next few years, the Company included more products and applications such as SPAR, Data Central, Marquee, IBCentral, etc. Later, the company merged DIRECTIONS interface, Marquee, and IBCentral into one, to form FactSet, a more versatile product for the FactSet clients. In further years, FactSet made some acquisitions including of Thomson Fundamentals database (2008), Market Metrics (2009), StreetAccount (2012), Revere Data (2013), Code Red Inc (2015), Vermilion (2016), BISAM (2017), Data Managed Solutions (2017), Truvalue Labs (2020), etc., adding to the growth of the company.
The CEO At FactSet
F. Philip Snow is the current CEO of FactSet. He is a B.A. graduate in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Snow started his career by working at companies like Global Content Sales and Americas Sales. He joined FactSet in 1996 and served the company in different positions. For a long time, he handled the Asia Pacific regions for FactSet, operating from Tokyo and Sydney. In 2015, he became the CEO at FactSet. He is also a board member of the company.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.