FactSet Introduces AI-Powered Portfolio Commentary

FactSet, a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider, today announced its latest GenAI advancement, Portfolio Commentary.

This innovative solution complements FactSet’s industry-leading performance attribution capabilities with detailed and source-linked commentary to empower buy-side and wealth management professionals to understand the key drivers of portfolio performance more holistically.

Powered by large language models (LLMs), Portfolio Commentary significantly reduces the challenging, time-consuming, and nuanced process of writing attribution summaries manually. Instead, with the click of a button, users can generate baseline and source-linked portfolio commentary for any attribution report in approximately 30-60 seconds.

“For over 20 years, FactSet has consistently delivered ever-improving solutions for attribution analysis. Today, we raise the bar with the introduction of Portfolio Commentary,” said Chris Ellis, Executive Vice President, Head of Strategic Initiatives at FactSet. “Based on internal testing, we anticipate this enhancement will enable asset managers, asset owners, and wealth managers to reduce the time spent writing portfolio commentary by a factor of eight and thus focus on the more high-value, strategic priorities of improving performance and strengthening client relationships.”

Key features of Portfolio Commentary include:

1. Deep Understanding of Relative Performance: Portfolio Commentary delivers four types of insights: an executive summary, sub-period analysis of trends, “stepping back” to explain relative portfolio performance starting from the benchmark, and “stepping in” which highlights the most influential securities within the analysis.
2. Key Company Drivers: Portfolio Commentary uses a proprietary algorithm to highlight companies with the most significant impact and provides a two-part answer: (a) the company’s impact, and (b) in partnership with Pebble Finance, the commentary summarizes what drove the company to a particularly strong or poor performance throughout the period.
3. Direct Source-Linking: Each sentence within the commentary includes auditable links to the numbers behind the given assertions. Users can navigate between the explanation and the supporting data to solidify their understanding of relative performance.
4. Streamline Stakeholder Communication: Commentary can be directly downloaded to Microsoft Word, stored in FactSet’s Research Management System (RMS), or leveraged programmatically, thereby allowing users to openly access the commentary, customize it, and share it with stakeholders in a timely manner.

“Our goal at FactSet is to make portfolio managers and research professionals over 50% more efficient at their job,” said Rob Robie, Executive Vice President, Head of Institutional Buy Side at FactSet. “Building on our award-winning performance and attribution systems, Portfolio Commentary advances this mission by generating attribution-based insights designed to better evaluate performance, contextualize portfolio attributions, and deliver tangible results. At FactSet, we’re proud to deploy technologies that enable a seamless workflow, empowering our clients to work smarter, make informed decisions, and achieve their investment goals with confidence.”

Portfolio Commentary can be accessed via FactSet’s Portfolio Analysis solution within the FactSet Workstation. Portfolio Commentary will be showcased at FOCUS, FactSet’s flagship client event that brings together top thought leaders, industry experts, and key decision-makers from the finance and technology sectors to discuss innovations that help drive the investment community forward. This year’s event will take place in Miami, Florida, from April 29-May 2, 2024. Following FOCUS, FactSet clients can speak with their account team for more information on accessing Portfolio Commentary.

To learn more about FactSet’s AI solutions, please visit: Artificial Intelligence | AI Technology Solutions | FactSet

About FactSetFactSet (NYSE:FDS | NASDAQ:FDS) helps the financial community to see more, think bigger, and work better. Our digital platform and enterprise solutions deliver financial data, analytics, and open technology to nearly 8,000 global clients, including over 206,000 individual users. Clients across the buy-side and sell-side as well as wealth managers, private equity firms, and corporations achieve more every day with our comprehensive and connected content, flexible next-generation workflow solutions, and client-centric specialized support. As a member of the S&P 500, we are committed to sustainable growth and have been recognized amongst the Best Places to Work in 2023 by Glassdoor as a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award winner. Learn more at www.factset.com and follow us on X and LinkedIn.

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