The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
MSCI Inc. is a New York headquartered, NYSE listed provider of investment decision support tools, best known for calculating the MSCI World, MSCI Emerging Markets and MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) equity benchmarks. The company runs close to 300,000 equity and fixed income indices daily and licenses them to asset managers and index fund sponsors, who build ETFs, mutual funds, futures and options on top of them; by its own account roughly $21 trillion in equity assets is benchmarked to its indices. Beyond indices, MSCI's business spans multi asset portfolio risk and performance analytics, ESG and climate data and ratings, and private assets data and benchmarks, organized as distinct reporting segments. MSCI's core differentiator is its licensing based, asset light revenue model: rather than selling data seats, it charges index users a fee tied to the assets tracking the index, which has made the Index segment the company's highest margin business. Its Analytics business grew out of the Barra factor risk models, used by institutional investors for multi asset portfolio risk management. Its ESG and climate ratings are widely embedded in fund labeling and regulatory disclosure workflows in Europe and elsewhere. Through its Burgiss acquisition, MSCI also operates one of the largest private capital databases in the industry, covering more than 15,000 private funds representing over $10 trillion in capitalized assets, putting it in direct competition with Preqin, Bloomberg, FTSE Russell and S&P Dow Jones Indices across the index, analytics and private markets categories. Its customer base is institutional: MSCI states it serves 94 of the top 100 pension funds, 98 of the top 100 asset managers and 82 of the top 100 banks globally. MSCI's index history traces to 1969, when Capital International in Geneva began publishing global equity indices; Morgan Stanley licensed the rights in 1986 and rebranded them as Morgan Stanley Capital International. MSCI became an independent public company via a November 2007 IPO on the NYSE, with Morgan Stanley completing its divestment by 2009; it is now an S&P 500 component under ticker MSCI. Growth since then has come substantially through acquisitions: Barra in 2004, RiskMetrics Group in 2010, Investment Property Databank (IPD) in 2012, GMI Ratings in 2014, the climate analytics firm Carbon Delta in 2019, Real Capital Analytics in 2021, and the private capital data provider Burgiss for 697 million dollars in 2023. The company reported 2024 revenue of about 2.86 billion dollars and roughly 6,100 employees. Henry A. Fernandez has served as CEO through this period of expansion, with Baer Pettit as President. On July 9, 2026, MSCI announced a strategic partnership with UBS to expand an AI powered private markets platform intended to unify fund discovery, portfolio management, analytics and benchmarking, aiming to bridge the historical data gap between public and private markets. UBS, whose Unified Global Alternatives business oversees more than 340 billion dollars in combined invested assets across hedge funds, private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure, is set to become an early adopter of the platform, contributing insights from its limited partner, wealth management and asset management businesses.
