Outlet profile

FactSet

U.S. financial industry, nonpartisan

Owned byPublicly traded (NASDAQ: FDS); no controlling owner — approximately 91% held by institutional investors including Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street

FundingB2B subscription revenue from investment firms, asset managers, hedge funds, banks, and other financial institutions

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

FactSet was founded in September 1978 by Howard E. Wille and Charles J. Snyder, both veterans of the Wall Street investment firm Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan. Their original product was a four-page standardized financial overview of individual companies, delivered to institutional clients. In 1981, FactSet launched its first client terminal for direct data access. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in June 1996 (ticker: FDS), broadening its ownership to institutional investors. Over the following decades it expanded globally, opening offices across Europe and Asia and growing its client base to more than 4,700 organizations with over 130,000 professional users worldwide. In 2012 it acquired StreetAccount, a financial news summary service staffed by former analysts and traders rather than traditional journalists, which became its primary editorial product. FactSet competes with Bloomberg Terminal, Refinitiv (LSEG), and S&P Capital IQ in the financial data space. Its content carries no discernible political orientation; it is written for portfolio managers, analysts, and traders who need market-moving information quickly, not general audiences. It has not been a subject of notable media-bias controversies and does not appear on political watchdog lists.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-08-03; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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