The LSE Directory / Index providers
MSCI Inc. is a New York based index, data and analytics provider whose core business is calculating and licensing equity, fixed income and multi-asset benchmarks used by asset managers, asset owners and banks worldwide. It calculates roughly 300,000 equity and fixed income indexes daily, including the flagship MSCI World, MSCI Emerging Markets and MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) families, which serve as reference benchmarks for a large share of global passive and active institutional money. MSCI licenses these indexes to fund providers, who pay a fee for the right to build ETFs and index funds tracking them; MSCI itself does not manage client money, its revenue comes from subscription and asset-based licensing fees. Beyond market-cap-weighted benchmarks, MSCI specialises in factor, thematic, climate and custom index construction, and organises its business into five operating segments: Index, Analytics, ESG and Climate, Real Assets and Private Capital Solutions. The Analytics segment, built on its 2004 purchase of Barra and 2010 purchase of RiskMetrics, supplies portfolio and risk models that many clients run against MSCI's own benchmarks; Real Assets, built on its 2012 purchase of Investment Property Databank (IPD), covers real estate and infrastructure data; Private Capital Solutions, built on its 2023 purchase of Burgiss, covers private equity and credit data. This breadth is the company's main point of differentiation from single-purpose index providers, since a client can source a benchmark, the risk model used to manage against it, and adjacent ESG or private-markets data from one vendor. MSCI states its indexes and analytics are used by 94 of the top 100 global pension funds, 98 of the top 100 asset managers and 82 of the top 100 banks. MSCI's index history dates to 1969, when Geneva based Capital International began publishing the first global equity indexes covering markets outside the United States; Morgan Stanley licensed that data in 1986 and branded it Morgan Stanley Capital International. Morgan Stanley took the business public in a November 2007 IPO on the NYSE under ticker MSCI and completed the separation by 2009. The company is headquartered at 7 World Trade Center in New York and led by chairman and CEO Henry A. Fernandez, with Baer Pettit as president and Andrew Wiechmann as CFO. For full year 2024, MSCI reported revenue of $2.86 billion and net income of $1.11 billion, with roughly 6,100 employees; the company's own current disclosure states that about $21 trillion in assets is benchmarked to its equity indexes. In its first quarter 2026 results (quarter ended March 31, 2026), MSCI reported revenue of $850.8 million, up 14.1 percent year over year, and adjusted earnings per share of $4.55. The Index segment's asset-based fee run rate reached a record $872 million, up 25 percent year over year; net new recurring subscription sales grew 52 percent to $39.6 million, with retention holding at 95.4 percent across product lines. CEO Henry Fernandez attributed part of the growth to what he called the "extraordinary expansion of the global passive investing industry," and coverage of the quarter noted that ETFs linked to MSCI indexes took in a record $103 billion of net inflows, about 35 percent of global equity index-linked ETF flows.
