Integrating with FactSet: Optionality for Clients

With FactSet’s Financial Operations Platform delivering:

• Content: Across 35 FactSet-owned Reference Datasets, Streaming Market Data, 850 Independent Third-party Data Providers, Client data, and more…
• Analytics: Full Range of Multi-asset Class Trading, Performance, Risk Analytics, and more…

APIs and Data Feeds (read: Data Sharing) have become top-of-mind to most of FactSet’s clients. Knowing when to use what type of integration pattern can be a difficult task.

This article aims to provide easy-to-understand guidance for the most common integration patterns and use cases between FactSet and clients.

Disclaimer: Though in some cases, “it depends” still applies. FactSet’s Developer Advocacy team can help guide you during your integration journey

Benefits of integrating with FactSet

• Eliminate time-consuming and error-prone manual routines
• Access business-critical information when and where you need it
• Get a 360-degree view of your business and customers
• Quickly and accurately respond to your customers’, and other stakeholders’, questions and requests

3 steps to a successful integration

There are 3 steps to integrating between FactSet and Clients:

3 steps to successful integration with FactSet

1. Scope: Understand which workflows you are targeting and which data the workflow would benefit from
2. Connect: Define the best way to connect with FactSet
   - Use the Optionality matrix below for guidance
   - Implement, test, and enable the integration
   - Consider performing an initial data load or load data in increments
3. Operate: You don’t fly an airplane without a cockpit
   - Measure everything, continuously analyze and optimize your operations supporting the integration
   - Measure not only systems and integrations, but also the data (access and usage). It’s important to get an accurate understanding of how data is used throughout the organization and the business value it brings

Optionality for integrating with FactSet

Once you have identified the scope, you need to define the best way to integrate. The matrix below describes the optionality FactSet provides to clients.

Many use cases we encounter can’t be solved through a single integration. Often, multiple integrations run in parallel to offer the best experience.

Click to Enlarge: Optionality for integrating with FactSet

What do we observe?

• Growing demand for APIs to support workflow automation and optimization
• Growing demand for File-Based Data Feeds using modern file types such as Parquet
• A shift in demand for data feeds SFTP based & RDBMS Data push to Data Sharing using Snowflake (Snowflake Data Marketplace) and AWS Redshift (AWS Data Exchange).

What’s next?

In the next article, we will go deeper into one of the integration options FactSet provides and how it operates.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to all that contributed to this blog post:

Author: Ralph Kootker
Managing Editor: Ralph Kootker
Reviewers: Charles Papagiannopoulos, Paul Casillo, Phani Adusumilli