Chapter 9

Private Markets

Private markets and private credit are the fastest-growing pocket of the financial-data industry, and it is the pocket where FactSet is thinnest. About 82% of its subscription value sits with buy-side clients in mature, public-market workflows [1]. Its answer to private markets is an embedded, sub-scale push — the 2021 Cobalt deal, a multi-year data build — not a standalone franchise. The scaled pure-plays, Morningstar's PitchBook and MSCI's Private Capital Solutions, already own the category.

This chapter picks up the thread Industry Tailwinds left open — whether FactSet is gaining or losing the private-markets race. The evidence says it is a coherent late challenger, monetizing private data as a workflow adjacency rather than trying to out-build the incumbents — a lower-cost path that is unlikely, on its own, to power a durable re-acceleration.

A public-market franchise, by design

FactSet's revenue base is concentrated where the industry grows slowest. Buy-side clients — asset managers, hedge funds, asset owners, wealth managers — account for roughly 82% of Organic ASV; the sell side is the other 18% [1]. Geographically the business is a North American franchise: the Americas produced $1,506M of FY2025 revenue, 64.9% of the total, with EMEA at 25.0% and Asia Pacific at 10.1% [2].

The three metrics are separate rows; read each against its own title. Source: FY2025 Annual Report, Item 1 Business [1] and Revenue by Geographic Segment [2].

That mix is the moat's home ground (Moat and AI) — deep public-market data, portfolio analytics, terminals with high switching costs. It is also the part of the industry where ambient growth is mid-single digit and shared with every large peer. The faster money is moving toward private capital, and FactSet has to reach for it from a standing start.

What FactSet actually has

FactSet's private-markets presence is real but embedded — spread across products rather than reported as a line. Three pieces define it.

The anchor asset is Cobalt Software, acquired in October 2021 for about $51.0 million. FactSet called it "a leading portfolio monitoring solutions provider for the private capital industry" and said the deal "expands our private market offering" [3]. Cobalt serves general partners monitoring their portfolios — a workflow tool, not a private-company database of the kind that anchors the pure-plays.

The second piece is content. Management describes "the largest content expansion in FactSet's history," built around three themes: deep sector, private markets, and real-time [4]. Private-markets data is being layered into the existing platform rather than sold as a separate franchise.

The third piece is the client channel. FactSet's Dealmakers firm type serves "investment bankers, sell-side research analysts, corporate users, investor relations officers, and private equity and venture capital professionals," offering "global coverage of public and private markets" in one workflow [5]. The strategic logic is integration — public and private in a single view — not a standalone private-capital product. Management has framed the private-markets opportunity as reaching "private equity, corporates, and hedge funds where we may not have been as active previously" [6]. That is the honest tell: a build into territory the company concedes it under-served.

Notably, FactSet discloses no separate private-markets revenue or ASV line. The effort is visible in strategy and acquisitions, not yet in a quantified growth number a reader can track.

The scaled pure-plays own the category

The gap becomes concrete against the two competitors that report private markets as a business. The contrast is not close.

"Latest revenue / run-rate" is PitchBook FY2025 revenue and MSCI Private Assets run rate as of Dec 31, 2025. Sources: Morningstar FY2025 10-K, PitchBook segment [7]; MSCI FY2025 10-K, Run Rate [9]; FactSet FY2021 10-K [3].

Morningstar's PitchBook is a dedicated private-capital data business: FY2025 revenue of $671.8 million, up 8.6%, at a 31.3% operating margin [7]. It covers the full lifecycle of venture capital, private equity, private credit and M&A, and serves roughly 10,200 client accounts and 113,451 licensed users [8]. One product line, aimed only at private markets, generates revenue equal to roughly 29% of all of FactSet — and grows faster than FactSet as a whole.

MSCI built its position by acquiring Burgiss. Its "All Other – Private Assets" run rate — essentially Private Capital Solutions — reached $292.0 million at the end of 2025, up 9.5% (7.4% organic) [9]. Both pure-plays grow their private-markets books several points ahead of FactSet's 5.4% company-wide revenue growth.

Growth rates: PitchBook FY2025 revenue +8.6% [7]; MSCI Private Assets run rate +9.5% [9]; FactSet FY2025 total revenue +5.4% [11].

S&P Global and Moody's are pushing into private credit from ratings; MSCI is extending from benchmarks. The category is being contested by companies larger than FactSet, each with a scaled, disclosed private-markets asset. FactSet enters it with a $51 million monitoring tool and a content-expansion program.

Gaining or losing

On the plain evidence, FactSet is a follower here, not a share-taker. There is no disclosed private-markets revenue line, no private-company database built to rival PitchBook, and management's own language — territory "where we may not have been as active previously" [6] — describes catch-up, not leadership. The single fastest-growing vertical in FactSet's industry is one where it is structurally under-indexed, and the re-acceleration examined in Financial Record is being carried by wealth and Asia Pacific, not by winning private capital.

The strongest fact against that read is that FactSet may not need to win the category head-on. Its bet is integration: private-markets content flowing into the public-market workflows its 82% buy-side base already runs, and into a Dealmakers franchise that grew organic ASV 6% in the most recent quarter, led by banking, with private-equity and venture-capital clients contributing [10]. That path monetizes private data across a large installed base without the cost of out-building an incumbent — a narrower ambition, but a cheaper and possibly more defensible one.

The read that fits the evidence: private markets is contested ground where FactSet is a coherent late challenger, not a leader, and it is unlikely to be the engine of a durable growth inflection. What would change that view is specific and falsifiable — a disclosed, quantified private-markets ASV line growing at a double-digit rate, or a scale acquisition on the order of MSCI's Burgiss deal. Until one of those appears, the prudent assumption is that the industry's fastest dollars keep accruing mostly to others.