Justin Langseth, Data Exchange CTO, recently interviewed Bryan Lenker from FactSet. Lenker is VP, Director of Client Technology and Solutions, and helped us understand how financial services organizations can benefit from alternative data in their data modeling and data science activities.
FactSet is a new data partner for Snowflake. For over 40 years, the world’s financial professionals have been relying on FactSet at every stage of their investment process. But why is FactSet providing their data via Snowflake Data Marketplace?
There’s been an explosion in alternative data over the past few years, both from financial professionals seeking it and from the providers who are creating it, and there are challenges on both sides.
From the financial professional perspective, which data sets to search for, across which categories to search, and how to scale this data sourcing process is a big challenge.
From the provider perspective, providers might have the greatest data in the world, but if they haven’t built up their reputation, it can be hard for them to get the exposure they need. Plus, their data likely isn’t structured in the way that large institutions expect: using standard symbologies such as CUSIP and SEDOL, using ISO codes for countries and currencies, and having point-in-time data. All these things can make it difficult to speed up their ability to distribute their data.
This makes for a very expensive and time-consuming endeavor on both sides.
As Lenker explains, FactSet offers much of the core content that financial professionals expect. For example, their Fundamentals data set contains annual, quarterly, and semi-annual filings; their Estimates data set contains data from sell-side analysts; and their Ownership data set contains data from 13-F filings, pricing, and mergers and acquisitions.
The power of all of this data is augmented when it is used via the Snowflake Data Marketplace. There, the data doesn’t move, so data consumers don’t have to worry about storage costs or waiting for file transfers to complete. And because the data is ready to be queried using SQL, there is no need for data transformation. Accessing this data via Snowflake Data Marketplace also gives data consumers a live data stream, so the data is always up to date. All this provides pretty compelling reasons to start using FactSet data in your own data analysis.
For more details and to see a live demo of FactSet and Snowflake Data Marketplace, check out the entire video interview below.