FactSet Research Systems Inc. - FactSet Performance System & Client Reporting Solutions
Type of System
- Data management
- Governance, risk, compliance (GRC)
- Internal/external reporting
- Performance attribution
Type of platform
- Cloud
- SaaS
- Web-based
Other features - does your offering facilitate
- Brinson Attribution
- Fixed Income Return Attribution
- Benchmark Relative Attribution
- Client Reporting
What are the typical implementation costs?
There are no typical implementation costs as they depend on the solutions and teams involved.
How long does your software take to implement on site?
Implementation varies depending on the length of history needed, the complexity of data (transactions or no transactions), and the number of portfolios. Typical implementation can last from six to 24 months.
Please name companies that use the system/solution
FactSet doesn’t disclose client names. However, around 150 global insurance firms use FactSet for performance and reporting solutions supporting the General Account and Funds Retirement business.
Do you have an open API?
Yes, every application within the FactSet ecosystem is accessible via APIs.
Does your solution incorporate AI technology? How?
FactSet’s portfolio toolset takes our market-leading performance, contribution, and attribution calculations and uses those results sets to generate portfolio attribution commentary using GenAI. This attribution commentary fully integrates into the Portfolio Analysis solution and optimizes the commentary workflows for front and middle-office analysts.
In addition to this new GenAI application, FactSet is also investigating the use of AI in the data management and reconciliation process for our performance clients. One area of interest is using predictive artificial intelligence to identify and suggest remediation for issues in client data, specifically breaks in holdings and transactions data sets fed from accounting and investment books of record.
We are currently investigating how reporting applications can leverage artificial intelligence from portfolio analysis tools. One area of interest is to provide advanced translations, data manipulation, and predictive commentary for reports and digital accessibility so that reports can be delivered faster and with fewer external touchpoints.
FactSet’s portfolio tools that generate attribution commentary using Gen AI can be wrapped into the reporting applications, streamlining the commentary process.
Most recent significant update:
FactSet Performance Solution received a significant update with the introduction of the Impact Analysis toolset. This toolset enables the application to automatically identify and reprocess data corrections and restatements from upstream platforms, streamlining performance workflows.
As a result, performance and analytics calculations and reporting workflows can now be initiated based on receiving upstream data changes. This improvement greatly enhances the efficiency of the performance workflow from both technical and user experience standpoints. It enables performance analysts to reprocess only the impacted accounts and date ranges during an accounting or investment book of record restatement workflow.
The reporting engine has also seen a significant upgrade by extending the REST API to incorporate aspects of the workflow. This allows users to access new endpoints specific to the product and kick-off schedules from other systems. Furthermore, users can now monitor the status of schedules and the delivery date of reports in products such as Salesforce and other systems with an API layer.
Another enhancement is the ability for clients to build their pages and documents using component libraries. This functionality empowers users to create more customized reports for their stakeholders and clients, leading to increased efficiency and reduced reliance on IT resources or FactSet support for making changes, ultimately resulting in faster turnaround for requests.
In addition, new APIs have been added to wrap around FactSet's workstation products, such as Portfolio Reporting Batching, Asset Cash Flow Projections, and behavioral analytics (Cabot). These APIs enable Snowflake users to fetch results from the calculation engine directly.
Planned future enhancements:
FactSet is working on a multi-year development project to incorporate total return and fund performance capabilities into our performance solution. This involves integrating with third-party fund accounting data sets and independently calculating top-down and bottom-up performance methodologies for time and money-weighted rates of return. These enhancements will not only have a significant impact on analytics and reporting but also underpin more advanced quality control processing and end-to-end performance workflow functionality.
In terms of reporting, our goal is to expand the range of endpoints so that users can view and track tasks from a workflow schedule using the API. We also aim to improve user-controlled reporting by enabling direct modification of dates or groupings on a report within the application and performing basic formatting tasks, such as adjusting column widths and headers.
How does your solution integrate with third-party systems or in-house systems?
FactSet’s open infrastructure allows integration with major Accounting and Data Warehouses to incorporate security masters and portfolio holdings. Performance and reporting solutions sit on FactSet datasets for the security level data, benchmark constituents with FactSet native data, and analytics. Reporting solutions can output results to all public clouds and be accessed via API through the primary visualisation tools.
What is the key attribute of your product(s) that differentiates it from your competitors?
FactSet Performance Solutions stands out from other performance tools due to several key pillars. With FactSet's extensive experience in market content and data integration, we offer a performance product suite that is fully integrated with content, providing clients with easy access to relative performance statistics and analytics compared to market indices and benchmark providers.
Another unique feature of FactSet's offering is combining ad-hoc and official performance calculations into a single platform. Users can input a simple list of identifiers into the application and quickly calculate the performance analysis of a hypothetical portfolio on the fly while using the official accounting book of record valuations to calculate accurate performance results.
FactSet utilizes a deployment model that is a significant differentiator. With a fully SaaS, enterprise-hosted solution, we provide our clients with a comprehensive technology and services stack, allowing them to focus on the value-added performance and reporting workflows that drive their business. Additionally, FactSet offers managed services for performance, reporting, and risk, which enables clients to supplement our products with a team of subject matter experts, adding efficiency and scale.
With performance system flexibility, FactSet also offers the same flexible technology and services to support our clients' reporting functions. Where insurance middle office teams can extract data from any source, whether structured or unstructured and create internal or external reporting content in any output format, securely delivering it to stakeholders via any mechanism.
Many insurance firms publish their variable or fixed annuity product performance and characteristics using FactSet's reporting tools.
The key differentiators in this area are:
Data: Save time and unlock the power of your data with native datasets and seamless ingestion, transformation, and enrichment of data from any source.
Design: Empower your team to work efficiently and maximize client satisfaction with scalable report design. Distribution: Improve the timeliness and accuracy of General Account or Annuity product communications with flexible delivery options and automated processes.
Services: Optimise your operating model with a flexible service suite that adapts to your ever-changing needs.
What trends are you seeing in terms of customer demand?
Further to the key differentiators above, customers demand highly performant SaaS solutions for their performance and reporting needs. A solution that does not require costly technology overhead and large operational support teams is becoming critical in performance. In today’s open data ecosystem, platforms must be scalable to ingest large quantities of client and market data, enrich with sophisticated performance and analytics calculations, and then quickly disseminate those data sets into their technology stack.
Digital/Portal has been a trend over the past ten years, and the annuity providers have been picking up on the trend for the last three years. FactSet has helped some of the largest annuity providers to build or integrate analytics with most portals. AI has been one of the latest trends among insurance firms, from investments and risk to sales and distribution. FactSet is currently exploring many avenues for AI to be used within our performance and reporting suite.
Accessibility is also an area that is important to us; there are many different directives in the marketplace, depending on region, such as ADA and EAA (Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), European Accessibility Act (EAA)). We have enhanced our system to automate digital accessibility for our clients.
Investment risk and analytics ecosystems are becoming more open, and data flows more freely. We want to create seamless connectors that promote consumption (Snowflake, PowerBI, etc.) and intraday views to ensure the front-office teams can exploit market opportunities. We have seen an increase in interest in integrating, calculating, and managing reporting for multi-channel output delivery.
Firms are evaluating what types of reports they want to manage vs outsource, but they still require a degree of control/insight. FactSet core reporting application Publisher has begun to address this need by releasing the component library and allowing clients to build their pages with drag and drop. FactSet will support the clients through their journey, but they’d have more control over the building process.
Contacts
Email: [email protected]
