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FactSet

FactSet – Solving All Financial Industry Problems Using The Latest Technology.

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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.

FactSet
Image Source: financialit.net

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.

Fiserv

Fiserv – The Dream of Dalton and Muma to build a national data processing firm in America.

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The whole world has been changing so fast that it demands newer technology in every part of life. No matter then it is healthcare service, or entertainment and traveling, or financial services. In this all, innovative technology raised the expectations of people, asking for the cut edge technology in every sector. When it comes to money transfer and data processing related services, Fiserv is one of the leading firms in the financial industry. It made it easy to transfer money as well as information to one another. With Fiserv’s platform, one can transfer money when and where as needed, at the point of thought. Thus, meeting all the expectations of the present high-tech world.

The best-known financial solutions it has enabled, assisting many individuals and businesses currently. Being a global leader, the firm is connecting consumers, merchants, businesses, and financial institutions with each other. This process has been done every minute of every day; we can say millions of times a day. Established in 1984 by George Dalton and Leslie Muma, having clients in more than a hundred regions all across the world. That strong foundation has led to the dominant financial service provider Fiserv is today. Despite having tough rivals, the firm has also offer tough competition through its innovative financial services and experience of more than 30 years in the field. Alltel Information Services, Affiliated Computer Services, M & I Data Services, and BISYS Group are some of the competitors of Fiserv. 

Fiserv Journey

Fiserv’s both Founders, and friend Muma and Dalton were in the business of data processing. But both were working separately. However, the idea of merging the businesses pop into their mind in the late 1970s. This idea turned into reality in 1984, the merger of the first data processing of Milwaukee, and Tampa’s Sunshine State System goes well. That, later on, resulted in the formation of Fiserv, which became the USA’s fastest-growing financial data processing firm in the near year.

Fiserv
Image Source: fiserv.com

Founders George Dalton and Leslie Muma’s role

The founders and presidents at Fiserv, Muma, and Dalton wanted to build a national data processing firm. Which later on they built in the form of Fiserv. It was the time when businesses’ mindset was to develop their own data processing system for limited deals. In this all, they had to pay big money and still no reliability in service. While Fiserv successfully changed this scenario under the guidance of Dalton and Leslie. Thus, the constantly escalating cost and insecurity had reduced, relieving the clients.  All the credit goes to George and Muma, who set the strong foundation of the firm.

George Dalton

Being well-experienced and well-reputed in the data processing industry, George served as the first CEO at Fiserv. He was one of them, who believes in hard work. Throughout his tenure, he built the policies based on thorough planning, implemented through hard work. Started the journey as a stock boy at some grocery store, Dalton, later on, learned German and served in World War II. While he shifted his focus on data processing during his high school days.

Thereafter, he joined Northwestern University, which he left to start working at the data processing unit of Bell & Howell Co. Despite a lack of banking knowledge, he handled the position of the data processing unit of Marine Bank. It was all due to his passion for and interest in data processing. Apart from that, he also served at Midland National Bank and First Bank System. With the helped of Muma, he then started his own dream business venture, Fiserv.

Leslie Muma

When he befriended Dalton in setting up Fiserv, Leslie was in his mid-30s, but having excellent knowledge of data processing system. His educational background helped him to work as a data processing consultant. A person who has studied theoretical mathematics, having a master’s in business administration, and top of that extremely knowledgeable in data processing, offered much more effort to raise the business of Fiserv. He became CEO of Fiserv after Dalton retired in 1999.

Boomed in the Financial industry

The top-notch service and acquisition strategy of the firm paid off soon. The business of the firm raised to 700 million dollars, reaching 800 financial institutions, and about 19 million individual clients. It also reduced the cost of financial service offering reliable and secure service to the customers. In fact, in the early 1990s, the firm has acquired a larger client base. One of the known acquisitions of Fiserv is the data processing division of Citicorp for 49 million dollars.

Thereafter, the firm managed to continued steady growth by providing innovative solutions to the clients. As well, the firm soon focused on abroad expansion of the business. Presently, it is one of the three largest data processing firms in America. Most importantly, it is the largest independent processor of checks in the country.