Hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Kelsey Zhu. I'm the Financial Information Services Analyst at Autonomous. And with me on stage today, we have Mr. Phil Snow, who is the CEO of FactSet. Thanks for joining us today, Phil.
Thanks for having us, yeah.
Phil, I believe you started your career at FactSet in 1996 as a consultant and was officially named CEO in 2015. Just wondering if you can talk us through kind of some of the material changes you've seen at FactSet over the last 30 years, and particularly how has FactSet's strategy changed in the last 10 years since you became CEO.
Yeah, thanks, Kelsey. There's a lot in 30 years. I would say many of the elements that made FactSet successful early on are still true today. Just think of us as a very powerful combination of technology, data, sort of understanding our clients' workflows, as well as, I think, trust is an important piece of that, because we've had a very hands-on business model over the years where we've gained the trust of our clients. I'll give a little bit of a history lesson. FactSet was the first company in our industry—we've been at it almost 50 years now—to get data from the cloud. It was a mainframe at the time into a spreadsheet environment. That was a massive efficiency gain for who we were serving at the time.
We also built some exceptional screening tools to sort of sift through all the data that was out there for the industry. We did it on third-party data. Our value proposition was technology, software, and service. We have evolved greatly since then. I would say now we have one of the largest, if not the largest, sort of corpuses of data in the industry. We collect data from—we still collect a lot of data from third parties because we want to give choice—but we collect a ton of data ourselves. Clients trust us with their data. Those are kind of the three stools of the data estate. We also do a very good job of integrating that data, cleaning it up, getting it to people on time, and tying it all together for analysis.
That's gold right now as we're entering this AI war, essentially. I'm very happy with that foundation. That really is, I think, probably the most valuable thing that FactSet has as a company. On the technology side, I'm very proud of what we've done over the last, I would say, six or seven years. We've really opened up our platform. We've become an API-first platform so people can integrate value from our company in whatever way they want. The thesis early on was there's probably going to be fewer humans in our industry, or they're going to be doing more. We've got to serve up value to the clients in the way that they want to consume it. It could be through the FactSet Workstation, but it could be through an API. It could be through a partner. We're really agnostic to that.
We're just going to price for the value of the data and analytics that we're serving up to our clients. Moving to the cloud, becoming API-first has put us in a very good position when it comes to AI. The other thing I'll point to is workflows. We've knocked off more and more of the workflows of our clients over the last 30 years. Early on in my tenure as CEO, I looked at the buy side. It's certainly the part of our business that's been under the most cost pressure because we've had that shift from active to passive management. Solving more of the workflow for the buy side, as they try to become more efficient and consolidate, was a very high priority for us. I think we're probably the gold standard in the middle office for the buy side.
When it comes to official performance, attribution, risk, reporting, we've really nailed that. And we've developed that into more of an enterprise solution. We've always been excellent at fundamental and quant research. So we've continued to expand those. But we've built out a lot of portfolio management capabilities. We acquired an EMS a while ago that's doing really well under the Portware brand. And probably the last major missing piece was an order management system, which we acquired through LiquidityBook. I think it was earlier this calendar year. So we've just continued to build out more. And on the buy side, in particular, our clients are looking to consolidate more, go with less partners, be more technology forward. So that's just one example, I think, of how we've evolved from a workflow standpoint. The last thing I'll point to is just continue to invest in data.
Over the last five or ten years, we've made a lot of effort to invest in private markets, private company data. We've got a very good asset there now. And deep sector data, if everyone knows what that is. Really being able to go deep in eight or nine different industries for the investment banks as part of their workflow.
Got it. I do want to circle back to the workflow conversation, AI investment, things like that. I also want to touch on some of the macro trends we've seen in the last two years. I think it's fair to say both the buy side and the sell side have seen some headwinds over the last two years. I was just wondering, Phil, in your view, what's the reason behind that slowdown in both of these markets? What are you hearing from clients since the beginning of this year? Kind of your expectation on when the current cycle would turn?
Maybe I'll go a little deeper on the buy side. Yeah, there's been a lot of cost pressure on the buy side, not just in the last two years, but at least for the last decade. There's been an ongoing effort from our buy side clients to upgrade their technology stacks, their data estates, rely on fewer partners, essentially, which is why we felt it was important to build out more workflow for them, as well as open up the platform. I don't think those headwinds are going away, Kelsey. I think the trick now is just becoming that trusted partner for the buy side. I still believe there's an opportunity for us to grow faster there. We have the trust of our clients now. We go into the buy side, it's much more of a C-suite, top-down, even a CTO conversation.
Let us come in. Let us blueprint your entire workflow and technology and data stacks and show how FactSet can overlay our product and our services to help save you money, essentially, be more efficient, and at the same time have some tools that allow you to surface new ideas. The other big trend, obviously, for the buy side is just everyone needs to become multi-asset class, right? If you're a large firm, you have the scale to do equity, fixed income, privates. If you're a boutique shop and you're very good at one thing, you probably have a good opportunity to have a successful business. I would say the stress is on the middle of the bell curve. If you're an average performing asset manager and you don't have scale, you're going to need some real help. FactSet can help each one of those segments.
I do not expect those cost pressures to go away. What we're really focused on is coming in and talking to the firms as a technology company, helping them with that, and not just talking to firms around their market data budget, but talking about their technology budget, which is interesting because there's been a lot of pressure on the market data budgets, just how much people are paying for data. There's a great willingness from firms to spend on technology, especially right now. Pivoting into that has been a good one for us. On the sell side, if you followed us, it's very cyclical. A lot of our sell side revenue is tied to headcount. Primarily junior bankers and also sell side equity research, but it's mostly junior bankers. We're the gold standard there as well.
We almost have a cult-like following with junior bankers who started their careers out of school, needed help. We were just talking like you can literally pick up the phone and get a FactSetter on the help desk in less than 30 seconds to help them. That's how I started my career at FactSet. We still have that model. What we've been doing is just continuing to improve the offering for the junior banker to make them more efficient, but looking for new ways to get into the banks at sort of different personas, different workflows, which we can talk about later. We are a little bit at the mercy of the hiring of the banks. I think for the last two years, that's been a bit slower for us.
I will just point out that our guidance that we have through the rest of the fiscal year, we're not relying on some big resurgence in banking hiring. I think if there's going to be a lot more activity and more hiring, my guess is it's going to come later this year, later this calendar year, or potentially even next year.
Got it. Super helpful. Phil, when I look at the global market data feed pool for the last 10 years and I look at FactSet's performance in that 10 years, I think it is fair to summarize FactSet's winning strategy for the last decade as being the right place at the right time. In terms of global market data feed pool, I think the fastest growing client segments were investment management and retail wealth management. FactSet is well positioned in those segments.
Yes.
Kind of looking forward to the next five to ten years, where do you see the key growth pockets are within the global market data feed pool?
Yeah. So I think, I mean, I saw some great work. I think it was late last calendar year. I think half of the revenues in our end markets are going to come from wealth, hedge funds, private equity, or private markets, essentially. Those are the areas that I think have the most momentum and are spending. That coincides, honestly, with sort of where we're seeing the most growth within the clients that we serve. Wealth, we've done exceptionally well at over the last decade. We've taken a lot of market share. Out of the top 20 wealth managers by assets under management globally, we've knocked out 10 of them. We've captured half of those, I'd say, in the last decade or so.
We now have 100,000 wealth advisors, high net worth, ultra high net worth, using the FactSet Workstation and our market data product and our Advisor Dashboard to sort of help them with their workflow. Frankly, we're in a pretty narrow slice of wealth right now. What I'm super excited about is the ability to go into natural adjacencies for FactSet there and grow. We see a lot of tailwinds in the wealth space. We're beginning to see, I think, very healthy activity from the hedge funds, which are, I think I've talked about this in the past, it's approximately 5% of FactSet's business. It's not a huge piece of our business today, but it's one that sort of really consumes a lot of data and analytics.
We are seeing some very healthy growth there based on the work we have done to build out data and deliver it in new ways.
Got it. You've mentioned private markets data a few times. I was just wondering if you can give us a quick update in terms of your investment there, your progress there, and how you're thinking about your strategy to expand for those data assets.
Yeah. So there's still a lot of opportunity there. The main focus we've had, Kelsey, is to just improve dramatically the coverage and quality of private company data on FactSet. A few years ago, we covered about 3 million private companies. I believe now we're up to 8 million or 9 million. The quality of the firmographics, the predicted financials, those are all markedly better. That particular data set is useful for lots of different types of users. We can sell it to private equity and venture capital firms. We can sell it to banks. Asset managers and asset owners are increasingly interested in this stuff. It's just a great data set that we can monetize across most of our firm types. We've become way more self-reliant on that.
Historically, we'd rely on a lot of third-party data and just do a good job of integrating that. We have stood a lot of it up by ourself now to be a higher quality.
Got it.
Yeah. So there's that. We also feed in a lot of very high-quality private markets data into our risk model. I talked about risk for the buy side. If you have a multi-asset class and you want a total portfolio view of risk, that's one area where we're monetizing it. The last one is we acquired Cobalt. This was a few years ago. That's a very nice portfolio monitoring tool for GPs, basically. It's a bit fragmented, honestly. I think there's still a lot of opportunity there if we can bring that together as a more holistic strategy.
Got it. Got it. Circling back to wealth as a vertical, obviously, FactSet has seen a lot of success in wealth. Over the last few years, I would say that we've also seen accelerated market growth on top of that FactSet's market share gain story. What would you attribute FactSet's success to in this segment?
Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about that product that's on the wealth advisor's desk. Let's say you're managing 100 relationships. We do a very good job of integrating all of the relationships that you have as an advisor, right? The families, the individuals. You can see that in real time, the same way you could if you were an institutional buy side client. You can kind of see your portfolio and how it's being affected by the market. All of the great flexibility we have for institutional clients, institutional buy side, you can group this however you want. Maybe it's the custom groupings of the firm you work for. You can put in whatever columns. It just gives you a very nice up-to-date flexible view of what's happening with your clients today.
All of the great market data FactSet has about what's happening in the markets, what's happening with the individual securities that your firms hold, that your clients hold, news. We have built something called Advisor Dashboard, which does a great job of organizing all of that for the advisor and giving them insight so that they can look like geniuses in front of their clients. Like NVIDIA Corporation, I think, reported after the market yesterday. If that's one of the biggest holdings of your clients and they have questions about that, we are going to make that. We are going to tee that up for the advisor so they are not hunting and pecking through a bunch of stuff and building in more AI capabilities. That product is good. The other thing that I think cannot be underestimated is it is very stable. The FactSet support has been good.
The speed of it is good. When we went in and pitched this to the larger wirehouses, in some cases, they have thousands or tens of thousands of advisors that have used the same product for a long time. The decision to change the lives of that many people by the C-suite was a big decision. We won, hands down, just in terms of speed, the stability of the platform, the service. It is sort of nuts and bolts stuff, but it is so important for clients. That is where we are today. Like I said, there is a lot of natural adjacencies where we can cross-sell into these clients that we already have and capture more of them.
You talked about introducing more AI features in the wealth vertical. Could you give us a little bit more detail on what kind of features or products that you're thinking about?
Yeah. Maybe I'll speak a bit more generally about our AI strategy. There are many legs to the AI strategy. One is something we call FactSet Mercury, which the official version of that will be released soon. Essentially, you can just come into the FactSet platform, whether you're a wealth user or any type of user, and just ask in natural language what it is you want from FactSet. It could be like, "Give me a great summary of NVIDIA Corporation's earnings call," and compare that to what they've said over the last few quarters, something like that. If you have a model that you've built out that has some custom codes in it, we can help you with that.
50% of the questions we get from clients are around like, "How do I build a code in FactSet to do this or that?" That is foundational stuff. I would say we are also very focused on there are kind of three legs to the foundation that any firm's going to need. It is, "How do I get something like high-quality data from FactSet?" Like, "This has the good housekeeping seal of approval that FactSet is data. I trust this data. How do I get the best of what is out there on the web from firms like Perplexity, for example?" Then for our own internal data, like, "How do we query that, right, as a company?" We are very focused on those three legs and doing them within FactSet or doing them within the client's environment. That is foundational stuff. Next, we are going deep on workflows for clients, essentially, right?
If you're a wealth advisor, if you're a performance analyst at a buy-side shop, if you're a junior banker, we know those workflows essentially well. We're going to build agents or capabilities that allow you to essentially take hours out of your week. A good example for wealth could be there are millions of portfolios that they have. Every quarter or month, you want to provide your client a summary of how they're doing, essentially. You can use automation and AI to do those types of things. We're excited about that. I think the last thing is, because of our open position in the marketplace, we're very open to partnering. There are lots of great startups that are out there that need data. They don't have it.
They're not going to be able to win, I think, unless they get access to high-quality data from firms like FactSet. Working smartly with them where we can both create value in the marketplace and monetize that is something we're also focused on.
Got it. Super helpful. As we look to the medium term, I think in your most recent investor day, you have it towards low double-digit type of growth for the wealth vertical. Maybe just talk us through, as you think about that low double-digit type of growth, how much of that would be market growth versus GenAI product penetration versus continued market share gains?
All right. The continued market share gains are going to be important. There are still tons of large firms out there to go capture with the product we have today. I imagine that is going to be a big part of the algorithm. Getting into these adjacencies, I talked about us being the gold standard for performance, risk, attribution, and reporting for the institutional buy side. We can talk a little bit more about what that looks like. Taking those capabilities now and applying those to the wealth vertical is really obvious to us and something that we can do. We know how to do it. It is a bit more of a scale thing because you are going from hundreds or thousands of portfolios that an institutional firm might manage to millions, basically, right? That is the trickiest part of it.
There is a whole bunch of cross-selling we could do to kind of help with that workflow. We have begun to touch on that with some of these clients. The other is all the business development workflows that an advisor has. How do I find my next client? How do I prospect my next client? How do I identify that client using AI, probably? Who is going to be the next one percenter, right, that I should be picking up the phone to? How can I create a proposal that really blows their socks off in terms of showing that we are a differentiated firm? We have partnerships in those areas, and we are working ourselves on some of these capabilities. We are so excited about that. I mean, there is going to be a generational shift in who the clients are here, basically, right?
Thinking about what a 20 or 25-year-old today that might be coming into a bunch of money or earning a bunch of money will want as a product from a wealth firm, that could change dramatically. That could actually change, I think, faster than potentially what the lives of a portfolio manager or an investment banker looks like over the next five years. We are giving a lot of thought to that in terms of AI and the mobile capabilities and the technology that firms will need to serve that next generation of wealth clients.
It sounds like the key growth drivers in that low double-digit growth is continued market share gains and expanding into adjacent workflows.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely.
Got it. I guess in that context, maybe it's helpful to talk through your thinking around total addressable market in the wealth vertical and your current level of penetration rate in that vertical.
Yeah. So I think our wealth business is now comfortably over $300 million of ARR or 15% of FactSet. I think there's continued doubles out there. I mean, I don't know exactly how big the market is, depending on how you define it. But it's got to be billions of dollars, essentially, right, of addressable market. I think with the product we have today, we're very well positioned to capture it. There's more than enough out there for, I think, many years and years of capturing what's out there today. It's pretty fragmented, honestly, the end markets for wealth and the solutions that people are using. A lot of the bigger firms have built a lot of things themselves over the years, understandably. There is a great opportunity to go in and really partner with them because you're seeing these larger firms.
They want to continue to build, but they don't want to do it all from scratch, right? The same way that we've become more modular, where we've tried to create Lego blocks out of our entire product. We can put them together. Partners can put them together. Clients can. I think there's a certain acceptance now from these firms that, okay, particularly with cost pressures, we've got to do what's our core competency and what's absolutely necessary. There's a greater willingness, I think, to partner to help to build these custom ecosystems.
I think that goes into the whole concept of total cost of ownership, right? It's not just the cost to run, but it's also the cost to build some of these. Yeah. I think that's a good kind of transition point into our next section, where I want to dive into institutional buy side with you a little bit more. I think what will be really helpful is, for starters, if you can tell us a little bit more about FactSet's current market positioning within the institutional buy side from middle back office of their workflows.
Yeah. Yeah. Again, in the middle office, the way we define it, right, I think we're the gold standard for performance, attribution, risk, and reporting. Years ago, we were a bit more of a desktop solution, and we had some batching capabilities. One trend I want to kind of reinforce here for everyone is that we've become positioning ourselves more as an enterprise provider, essentially, right? Less solutions that you might just run off your desktop and batch or an individual uses, but more of an enterprise solution that the entire firm can sort of run with some consistency while still providing that flexibility. That's been the stickiest and probably strongest part of our buy side offering for decades, honestly. I'm not sure that many firms can touch us in that regard. Building that out to be more enterprise is important.
Adding on managed services. What we're seeing now with these enterprise solutions is not just FactSet coming in from a professional services standpoint and implementing the solution, but the client's desire for us to kind of continue to work with them to maybe reduce some of their reliance on their internal headcount for some of these processes. I can get into specific examples of that if you like. That piece is very healthy. I'd say the focus there is just continuing to build out the multi-asset class capabilities of that. In the front office, FactSet has always had a very strong position with fundamental research and quant research. I would say PMs that are a bit more quantitative themselves and want to roll their own when it comes to looking at their own performance attribution and such.
What we've been very focused on for a number of years now is building more of a portfolio management system for the portfolio managers. We did a good job of that. All the flexibility that FactSet offers for the middle office, put that on the front office where they're going to want consistency as a firm and get the order and execution management capabilities in there for the PMs and the traders. We had Portware integrated. The EMS are just doing great. We partnered with LiquidityBook and some other firms for OMS. We saw enough to give us the confidence that LiquidityBook is a great order management system, doing very well in hedge funds, smaller asset managers, and in some cases, RIAs, and had a technology stack that we felt that we could scale over time that was multi-asset class.
We love the asset, the people, the success they were having, but as importantly, the tech stack. As we invest in this, we should be able to go upmarket, I think, and compete more for more front office market share. There is tons of it out there, basically, right? Very focused right now on the PM. The back office, we have been less focused on over the years. What we are really investing in now is more of our own feed capabilities to kind of feed back office systems and our own exchange data feeds as well. That is part of what we used to call CTS. It is now called data solutions. That is one of the faster-growing pieces, not surprisingly, of FactSet, which is delivering data through APIs or through our clients to build their own systems.
Traditionally, that was more end-of-day historical data for quant research, production, performance systems, but increasingly getting into pricing, corporate actions reference data, and exchange data feeds gives us a great opportunity to feed more of these systems. That is what is needed now. When you go in and pitch an integration to a client at the enterprise level, you have got to have both the on-and-off platform capabilities these days to capture that.
Phil, as you talk through your positioning in front, middle, back office workflows, one question I was kind of thinking about is, in your view, do clients want vendor diversification, or do they want sort of a one-stop-shop type of solution?
Many of the larger clients, in particular, I think it's smart of them. They're not going to completely rely on one vendor. I think that's too risky, frankly. I'm not sure any doesn't. We don't do that. Any business needs backup, right, or some choice. I think what we're seeing is going from, yeah, maybe they were relying on three or four larger vendors and a long tail of 200 other data and technology firms. Let's cut that in half. Let's get to one or two keystone primary vendors that we rely on and shorten that tail of other firms that we can. We do sit side by side with some of our bigger competitors in these shops because there are firms with very good capabilities. I don't think anyone can do everything.
Even if they did, I think it would be a bit of a risk, frankly, for you. You just have too much leverage over the client. The client could be, from a disaster recovery standpoint, in hot water if they did not have backup.
Got it. Super helpful.
For us, as we're getting into some of these newer areas, we can easily pitch ourselves as the backup. You don't have to come in and go, "Hey, we're going to replace this thing that you've had for the last 10 years," but you need backup. If you believe in our strategy and where we're going and you trust us, we can build into that over time for you.
Got it. Who are your main competitors in the front, middle, back office workflows?
I would say the main competitors in our for the buy side, I would say it's primarily Bloomberg and BlackRock Aladdin, right, which are both very good firms. Those are the two competitors that we see the most on the buy side. Yeah.
Got it. Let's talk about managed services. I was wondering, who are really the target customers for managed services? Is it mostly smaller to medium-sized asset managers who could benefit from outsourcing a lot of these middle to back office staff costs? Or how are you thinking about the target audience?
I would say for now, it's some of the bigger firms. Where we're implementing these enterprise solutions for performance, risk, and reporting, where essentially a lot of the asset services are talking to us, and we've had press releases on one of them where they're outsourcing some of that to us for now. I think there's an opportunity to grow over time. If we're running this official performance on behalf of their clients, they're going to want to make sure, right, that we're monitoring that very closely and that we have dedicated resources that are interacting with the client, particularly during the reporting pod. At least that's one of the areas today that we're seeing it. The other one is data as a service.
I think as firms begin to look at their data estate, need to connect it better, need to clean it up, need to vectorize it for use with AI, that's what we do for a living. We can help clients with that. Many of them don't have the capabilities. We have a very important and good asset owner that we're working with with some of those capabilities. One we've had for a long time, which I should probably just remind everyone, is we do have a product called Portfolio Services that we've had for a long time. That does address actually a pretty broad swath of clients. We built that originally for if you had fixed income, if you wanted to do fixed income attribution and performance and risk on FactSet, that's a lot hairier a problem to solve for a client than equity.
For equity, you need a limited number of inputs to be able to do that analysis. For fixed income, there are so many different terms and conditions and things that you need to get right that if one or two of them are off, you're going to screw up your analysis, basically. What clients have been doing for a long time is sending us overnight their fixed income positions. We run it through a whole process with technology and people. We look for things that do not look right for the client. We can suggest fixes, but they can come in in the morning then and run their process with a lot more confidence. That has been a very successful business line for us and a great example of managed services. All of this is not a huge part of FactSet.
I do think when people hear managed services, people get nervous. They think low margin. For us, actually, it's been sort of a required piece of an enterprise solution for our clients. I think we're running that at a pretty healthy margin right now.
Got it. If you've achieved great success in managed services and are able to penetrate a large part of that total addressable market, would the profitability of this product change then? Because maybe it means you need to hire a lot more incremental staff, even if it's in cheaper locations. How are you thinking about the profitability of managed services?
Yeah. So I mean, our client-facing staff, Kelsey, has sort of evolved greatly over time. We might have around 2,000 people that are facing off with clients all the way from picking up a help desk at the Union Bank to someone's running my official performance. We have already solved that. We are a global company. We have a lot of great employees here in the US, but we also have employees in other time zones, which is super helpful for these round-the-clock processes that the people are running. We can hire people with different talents in different places very easily. We already have, I think, this solved for and have a way to find the talent that we need.
Got it. In terms of your thoughts around total addressable market for managed services?
Again, I think it's I don't have a number for you, but I think it just goes hand in hand with some of these enterprise solutions. I would just sort of tie it to the addressable market for those, so.
Got it. Got it. In terms of just key growth drivers in your mind for institutional buy side overall over the next five to 10 years, outside of managed services, are there other growth drivers you'd like to highlight?
Yeah. I mean, it's a great portfolio of stuff. I do think we need to capture more front office users. How do we get more PMs and traders excited about using FactSet? I think we've got a great story there. We have a very competitive product. The feeds that we spoke about are going to be very important. I would point to the technology. Everyone's going to need a winning AI strategy, right? Even if it's going to take longer than people think. I think firms understand that this is a megatrend, and they're at serious risk of not outperforming their competitors if they don't have a strategy there. I'm very confident that we're in a good position here, probably ahead of most of our competitors. At least that's the feedback I'm getting from clients and analysts.
Keeping that lead and getting the trust of clients and working with them on that technology stack, whether they're buy side or other firms, is going to be an important piece of our success, yeah.
As you think about the AI strategy of both buy side and sell side clients and for FactSet, do you think in the future this is sort of table stakes for everyone, or this is going to be one of the main competitive advantages for FactSet?
I do not think it is table stakes. I do think everyone's going to need a strategy, but I do not think it is a simple thing, right, that you can get right. Right now, we are very focused on we have built the foundation and a lot of very good capabilities. We are focused now on agentic workflows, right? How can we begin to stitch these together for our clients and ourselves in a way that just really creates a lot of efficiency for clients? I was at an AI conference in the last few weeks, and I think with a lot of financial services firms like yours. I think everyone realizes the importance of this. I do not think anyone has a massive degree of confidence of where it is going even 18 months out. Everyone just knows they have got to be working hard.
They also know it's a massive change management problem. I think half of the problem with change management is getting people comfortable with the tools, using the tools, and working together and not feeling like they're in a threat condition, basically, if they begin to use these things.
Got it. One of the main products you've launched that utilizes GenAI is Pitch Creator. Maybe tell us a little bit more about how you think about the positioning of that product. You talked about enhancing efficiencies for investment banks. I'm not sure the right way to think about this is how many junior bankers or how many junior banker hours can Pitch Creator really replace and talk us through the pricing strategy for that product as well.
I do think, and my number one is like, what's the ROI on AI? The easiest thing to do is just measure the hours. How many hours is it taking out of somebody's week? And that's the way to think about it. I think we're pretty far away, at least in our industry, from front office professionals getting replaced by AI, right? I think it's going to be who's my agent or set of agents that even if you're an individual contributor, you're a manager now. You're managing these agents, basically. Think of them like employees that need training. They're going to make mistakes and work with them. So Pitch Creator is really just designed to take hours out of a junior banker's week.
Whether or not the bank decides to give those hours back to the junior banker or just make them do more stuff, yeah, I do not know. That is not our job to figure that out for them. I think they will just probably be the only thing they are going to be asked to do more. We have created some great—we already had a massively good product that was already automating a lot of stuff for them. This is just the next obvious leg of it. Automatically creating charts, tables, just all of that work that a junior banker has to do to bring together the information resources just makes that easy for them and gives them the confidence that they are putting the right stuff in front of their bosses, right? Logo intern is this we just acquired.
It's a very small company, but I don't know if any of you have done this, but the arduous task of placing 50 logos on a PowerPoint slide, I can't do that. That was just a nightmare probably for a lot of people. It's little things like that, but when you put them all together into a workflow and it adds up, it's good. We've already sold a couple of, I think, important clients with this. I believe we have as many as 50 ongoing trials and evaluations of Pitch Creator. I would say it's the SKU that has the most momentum right now in terms of the deep workflows that we spoke about. I think it just proves to me that we've done a good job.
It is an enterprise sales model. It is not seat-based.
Absolutely, yes. Sorry, I didn't address that part. Yeah, it's an enterprise model. It's an add-on. Typically, if you're a bank, you're going to subscribe to a certain number of seats over a multi-year period. In most cases, I believe this is going to be positioned as an additional value.
Got it. The pricing for Pitch Creator, or it's kind of client by client dependent?
I think the pricing of all of this stuff is fluid. I think what a lot of clients want is some certainty around budget. I think we're probably just pitching, like, here's a band of usage or users that you can have for this amount of money. I mean, I have heard from some clients that they want to sort of try before they buy and a little bit more than a trial, but pay on a usage basis. Not the sell side, but sort of smaller buy side shops. We have done a lot of work to sort of build the infrastructure to get to a place where we can begin to charge clients if they want that with a usage-based model, which actually I think is a great idea.
Got it. Speaking of the sell side and investment banks in general, where are we in the cap markets recovery cycle? I think we've certainly seen a lot of mixed signals since the beginning of this year. Just curious to get your thoughts.
Yeah. I think, yeah, your guess is as good as mine. I think mixed signals is right. I'm not sure the banks have really changed sort of their hiring plans. It feels to me that that's sort of pretty stable. In terms of activity, you hear, like, hey, it's the slowest it's ever been to, hey, we're still doing great and we haven't slowed down at all. I don't think there's a rising tide lifting all boats yet, by any means. I think the great thing about FactSet is we have a very good portfolio of stuff. Our banking business is not the junior banking business is not the biggest piece of FactSet, by any means. It does sort of move up and down with these cycles. We're very consistent. We're very sticky.
We're not the type of product that I think can easily be sort of canceled. That is good. I'm optimistic that towards the end of this calendar year, maybe things pick up. It feels like it's sort of consistent with how it's been for the last 12 months right now.
Got it. As we think through that sell side, ASV growth, reacceleration, I guess outside of a cap markets upcycle, are there other key growth drivers?
Yes. Yep.
Maybe GenAI and Pitch Creator is one of them. Talk us through the other key growth drivers that you're.
Yeah. I spoke about opening up the platform and creating LEGO blocks. There are lots of other personas at the banks we can get into, like sales and trading, the senior bankers. I think we're very focused on capturing the mind share of the senior bankers and sort of thinking about their workflow. AI can play, I think, a very good role in that. We have great examples of where we've sold more feeds to the banks now to feed other systems, where we've taken components of FactSet and plugged it into their CRM environment. If Salesforce or some other CRM is the main workflow tool for a user, we can put pieces of FactSet in there that are interesting. We've been very focused on that.
I think sell side ASV in general is more cyclical for FactSet versus buy side ASV. How should we think about a normalized medium-term ASV growth for the future?
Yeah, that's a good question. I'd say if you look over the last 10 years, I think we were probably high single digit, maybe a bit further back, and it's probably mid-single digit right now, or it could even be low single digit. I think we're probably close to the bottom of where it's been from a median or average standpoint. If you believe in the past, and we do get some stronger capital markets, I think it would make sense to me that it would go back to the median or average of where it's been historically.
Got it. I know you have already sized kind of GenAI ASV growth contribution in fiscal year 2025, which is 30-50 basis points. Have you kind of thought about the medium-term targets in terms of both ASV and margin impact from GenAI investments?
We're going through that now. You know we're an August-end company. This is typically when we refresh our three-year plan. I think we'll take stock of where we landed this year versus where we thought, and we'll have more to talk about there probably in the coming quarter.
Got it. Circling back to our conversation around data assets for FactSet, I think we've talked a little bit about your investments into private markets. In the past, you've also talked about more investment into real-time and deep sectors. Just wondering if you can give us a quick update on progress made in those data assets and kind of your strategic thinking around which area or which categories are you most interested in investing in for the future.
I think real-time is a great opportunity. There are billions of dollars of addressable market there that FactSet historically has not participated in. It is growing really quickly. We are getting some important wins, I think, both some larger firms as well as a steady diet of smaller companies. I think there are approximately 250 venues globally that we would get data from, and we have probably 80% or 90% of those that we are getting direct ourselves now and not through third parties. Finishing up that work will be important essentially to having the ability and the rights to go out and monetize this more aggressively. We have got a crack team there, so we have hired some very good people that have done some of this historically. I have a lot of confidence, sort of a no-regret invest and get a high ROI in real-time.
That can be applied across so many of our clients. Deep sector has been a bit more of, at least initially, very focused on how do we retain and expand our junior bankers because there has been consolidation in that part of the industry, and we did not have deep sector. Deep sector is, imagine if you are a FIG banker and you want to look at the Americas, you are thinking about a merger between two regional banks. We will now show you all the different branches, all the data associated with the branches, and you can do a merger model that way. We did not have that stuff historically, but same thing with mines. It does not matter. It is very, very granular data, and it has probably been the biggest data initiative we have ever had at FactSet to build that. We started in 2019.
It's not something you can knock out in a few years, but we've made significant headway. It's helped us with renewals. It's helped us capture some new clients, I believe. We might be halfway through that. You don't have to complete this essentially to monetize it. There's still a lot of work to be done there. I do think now that it's reached a bit of a critical mass, we can begin to monetize that effectively with hedge funds, with asset managers. We've not sort of focused on the buy side in terms of monetizing that because it was such a sell-side-focused product. I think there's, and that's the way the world is going, is you're needing more and more granular data to compete and come up with ideas, right, within the industry.
Definitely. I would say data solutions or CTS is a key growth driver of many of your competitors as well. I think some of the usual suspects, like LSEG, S&P, they just have a much larger data solutions type of business. Maybe talk us through your strategy to gain share in that market.
Yeah. First of all, it's building a great product. There's a bit of an advantage to doing it more recently because you can always use the latest tech, right? You're not reliant on a legacy tech stack. A lot of what we've done for real-time, we did Cloud First essentially, which has helped with, I think, speed and reliability and so on. Some of it's just you need it for the enterprise pitch. I think we're newer to the space. We're excited about it. I think we have the trust of our clients, and there's a great appetite to have some alternatives, which we're excited about.
Got it. Talking about the competitive landscape, I think recently there's been a lot of conversations around the ongoing development for the competitive landscape between FactSet, LSEG, S&P. Maybe just talk us through some of the latest trends you're seeing or hearing from customers. I think based on the market data that we can see from Burton-Taylor, it seems that LSEG has been able to hold share in the last three years versus being a share donor in the last 10 years. Just talk us through what you're seeing there.
I mean, we do not compete with them. They do lots of stuff that we do not do. I think the piece of the business where we compete with them is primarily the wealth space. I think our results speak for themselves there. That is primarily where we see LSEG, at least today from a competitive standpoint. I mentioned the competitors we see on the buy side. Typically in banking, we see S&P Market Intelligence. In private equity, venture capital, corporates, I think there is a mixture of firms in there. I think we are doing great from a competitive landscape and taking market share for the pieces of the market that we address today. I am super confident in our product. I mean, the wealth product is killing it.
All the work we've done for the junior bankers, I think we still have that cult-like following. I think we're still regarded as sort of the gold standard there as well. I am not concerned about our competitive position. On the buy side, I do think to compete effectively on the buy side because of the consolidation, you've got to have the portfolio analytics story. You can't just have a piece of the business, which is the back office, the front office, or the middle office. I do not think you can get in the door seriously as being one of those keystone firms that a client wants to work with unless you have capabilities in all three of those areas.
Got it. Maybe let's just end on a capital allocation question. Maybe talk us through your latest thinking on M&As. What are some of the key areas you're interested in and any financial criteria for these targets?
Yeah. Our strategy has not changed much there over the years, right? FactSet's strategy has to do tuck-in acquisitions of data and technology. The advantage of that is it has helped us keep a cohesive ecosystem, right, and not have a really fractured business that is not well integrated. That has served us well, and I think will serve us exceptionally well now with AI. We continue to look at things in the wealth space, obviously. Private markets is interesting. Anything regarding the feeds business that we spoke about, those are some of the obvious areas. If we see something that we think is good for FactSet, like QSIP, which was a bit of a sort of an outlier, we are ready to pounce and execute on it. We do have now the ability to do something more aspirational if the right asset emerges.
Got it. Got it. Super helpful. Thanks so much for sharing with us today, and thanks everyone for joining us.
Great. Thanks, Kelsey.