The LSE Directory / Data providers
FactSet Research Systems Inc., trading as FactSet, is an American financial data and software company headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut. It supplies integrated market data, analytics and workflow tools to investment professionals, including portfolio managers, research analysts, risk managers, sell side equity researchers, investment bankers and wealth managers, delivered mainly through the FactSet Workstation, developer APIs and bulk data feeds, alongside services such as data delivery, index and benchmark administration, portfolio and risk analytics, and transition management. FactSet's distinguishing approach within its category is aggregation and linkage rather than pure proprietary origination: it ingests feeds from exchanges, brokers, news sources and hundreds of third party contributors and normalizes them into one connected dataset. Its Open:FactSet Marketplace, launched in 2018, catalogs data feeds and APIs from external providers spanning ESG, ownership, supply chain, satellite imagery and other alternative data, letting clients license non-FactSet data through a single integration rather than negotiating each source separately. Buy side clients make up the large majority of its subscription base, a different center of gravity than sell side focused terminal providers. Since 2022 it has also owned CUSIP Global Services, making it the official numbering agency for CUSIP and CINS identifiers globally and for ISIN identifiers in the United States, a role none of its direct terminal competitors hold. FactSet was founded in September 1978 by Howard Wille and Charles Snyder, who met while working on Wall Street and set out to deliver computer based financial information directly to clients; company lore holds that data was originally distributed on paper by bike messenger before moving onto terminals. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996 under ticker FDS and joined the S&P 500 index on December 20, 2021. FactSet completed the acquisition of CUSIP Global Services from S&P Global for approximately $1.925 billion on March 1, 2022, and acquired the order and execution management vendor LiquidityBook for about $246.5 million in February 2025. For fiscal year 2025 (ended August 31, 2025) it reported revenue of $2.32 billion and roughly 12,800 employees across about 35 locations in 19 countries. Sanoke Viswanathan, previously of JPMorgan Chase's international consumer and wealth business, became chief executive officer in September 2025, succeeding longtime CEO Phil Snow. In its most recently reported quarter, fiscal third quarter 2026 ended May 31, 2026, FactSet posted revenue of $622.9 million, up 6.4 percent year over year, with annual subscription value of about $2.48 billion, up 7.1 percent organically, serving more than 9,100 clients and over 247,000 individual users. The company has been pushing AI features across its platform, stating that more than 90 percent of its top 50 clients now use four or more of its AI products, and announcing new partnerships including Google Cloud, Finster AI and TIFIN.AI during the quarter.
