How FactSet is transitioning from data company to AI solutions company

NEW YORK — The most powerful language model in the world can still be confidently, expensively wrong, and that is exactly where 48-year-old financial data house FactSet intends to make its stand. Chief Executive Sanoke Viswanathan told FinAi News at the company’s investor day on Nov.10 that it is going through a “very big reset,” recasting itself from a data and information vendor into the “most trusted financial intelligence platform.” [caption id="attachment_57384197" align="alignright" width="292"] Courtesy/Bloomberg[/caption] Frontier models from the likes of Anthropic and Google are now capable enough, he said, that raw model horsepower is no longer the obstacle to adoption. “The real constraint is trust,” he said, adding that FIs want clean, reliable answers at a defensible price. Point a frontier model at the wrong data, he warned, and it will only “get you the bad information faster.” The safeguard, he said, is proprietary data and context. FIs prefer working with entities that have been in the regulated industry and can provide measurable outcomes based on their own data without risking the safety of the data. The numbers That thesis is landing in numbers. FactSet closed fiscal 2026, which ended Aug. 31, with organic annual subscription value (ASV) of roughly $2.57 billion, up 7% year over year and its largest quarterly ASV increase on record, according to its earnings report. ASV measures subscription revenue of the company. ASV tied to AI solutions more than doubled year over year, and AI products made up at least 10% of new business booked in Q4, more than the company generated from AI in all of fiscal 2025, Viswanathan said during the Nov. 10 earnings call. His larger ambition is to widen the wallet FactSet reaches. The firm’s data budget market is roughly $40 billion and will drift toward $50 billion over the next few years, he said. But by selling AI solutions rather than data feeds, FactSet can court technology, AI and transformation budgets that are “exponentially bigger.” The pitch now goes to chief information and technology officers, not just chief financial officers. “You’re operating at a different level and viewed as a strategic partner,” he said. The company launched more than five tools this year including FactSet AI Banking, Portfolio Analytics, AI for AML and Intelligent Document Analysis, according to FinAi News' prior reporting. The company has a multimodel approach for development and embedding AI in its tools, Viswanathan said, adding that it also uses open weight models for certain tasks. "AI is becoming a commodity and we don't plan on building our own AI model for the same reason," he said. Avoiding becoming a commoditized data pipe The risk is that data providers get reduced to being a cheap pipe feeding someone else’s model, Andrew Jamison , CEO of expense management company Extend , told FinAi News . "Proprietary data is a competitive advantage, but serving it on someone else's plate is how your data becomes commoditized," Jamison said. Viswanathan’s answer is to embed FactSet more deeply into the tools they already use, not less. Counterintuitively, engagement rises when clients plug FactSet into Anthropic , Google or OpenAI, he said. When digital banking came to the forefront, many believed that branches would die, but inversely, people started visiting the branches even more, he said. "Customer would log in 10 times a week and then go meet a banker to see what they can do with their money." Similarly, when FactSet is accessed via frontier model UX, users tend to move to FactSet's platform after a couple of prompts to look at the data more closely, Vishwanathan said. "It's like a funnel." While the company has been on per-seat revenue-based model, with AI, the company plans on adding another tier of consumption-based pricing for heavy AI users. Register here for early-bird pricing for the FinAi Banking Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Denver. View the full event agenda here .

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How FactSet is transitioning from data company to AI solutions company

Tech budget dwarfs data information budget, CEO says

Allegacy Financial to tap Kobalt Labs agents

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