Alan Bettridge, the Senior Vice President and Director of Sales for the company spoke about who they are as a company, their recent developments and their acquisitions and plans for the future.
As a company, FactSet integrates multiple sources of data to help their clients make the best financial decisions possible, empowering their reporting and how they communicate with their own clients. Factset also provides technology and software solutions that connect the investment decision-making process from research, decision making, order and execution management all the way through to performance attribution and risk client reporting. By offering a vast array of services they help their clients to make the best decisions with regards to technology and data.
Bettridge notes there are two specific ways Factset assists the wealth management industry. Firstly, FactSet enables clients to consolidate, often multiple, investment decision support data platforms into a single platform to help them save money and become more efficient organisations. He also highlighted an equally if not more important way they help clients - by enabling them to communicate with their clients, such as end users and high net wealth individuals.
In terms of recent developments, Bettridge explained that FactSet has continued to develop their product in terms of internal technology and its capabilities. FactSet is committed to delivering more content and value to their workstation that in turn supports the work of the relationship and portfolio managers. This can be something more involved such as managing and optimizing portfolios or something simple as improving how they communicate research ideas inside their firm. FactSet’s core technology continues to evolve and develop and therefore are able to offer more solutions via the web and provide more ways for investment teams to communicate internally and with their clients in the field.
FactSet has continued to make more acquisitions in the last year, stated Bettridge. As a result, they are now offering full and integrated support for the investment lifecycle connecting research to portfolio managers through the company’s research management solutions. FactSet is now also offering trading and execution capabilities and acquired a company called Portware. Portware is a market leader in executive management. Simba is another company that that FactSet acquired, a market leader in order management and pre and post-trade compliance features.
FactSet has also made two recent acquisitions - Bisam and Vermillion. Bisam is a market leader in portfolio attribution, performance measurement and GIPS Reporting; while Vermillion is a market leader in Client Reporting. Specific to the wealth management sector, FactSet also acquired a company called IVMS which they have rebranded as FactSet Digital. Enabling them to provide bespoke and custom client-facing websites powered by FactSet’s data. Supports the shift they are seeing from many wealth management clients to offer a richer digital platform to help the communication and enable their clients to make better decisions.
The year ahead in Asia Pacific is a busy one for FactSet, according to Bettridge, who said that the company plans to continue focusing on expanding their client base in the wealth management community while aiming to increase client-facing capabilities within the region.
WRITTEN BY
You might be interested in
