About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

FactSet Expands GenAI Offerings with Portfolio Commentary

Subscribe to our newsletter

FactSet, provider of a financial digital platform and enterprise solutions, has expanded its GenAI offerings with Portfolio Commentary. The solution complements the company’s performance attribution capabilities with detailed and source-linked commentary allowing buy-side and wealth managers to understand key drivers of portfolio performance more holistically.

Powered by large language models (LLMs), Portfolio Commentary also reduces the time-consuming and nuanced process of writing attribution summaries manually. Instead, FactSet claims, users can generate baseline and source-linked portfolio commentary for any attribution report in about 30 to 60 seconds.

“For over 20 years, FactSet has delivered ever-improving solutions for attribution analysis. We are now raising the bar with the introduction of Portfolio Commentary,” says Chris Ellis, executive vice president, head of strategic initiatives at FactSet. “Based on internal testing, we anticipate the solution will enable asset managers, asset owners and wealth managers to reduce the time spent writing portfolio commentary by a factor of eight and focus on the more high-value, strategic priorities of improving performance and strengthening client relationships.”

Key features of Portfolio Commentary include deep understanding of relative performance through four types of insights including an executive summary, sub-period analysis of trends, ‘stepping back’ to explain relative portfolio performance starting from the benchmark, and ‘stepping in’ that highlights the most influential securities within the analysis; use of a proprietary algorithm to highlight companies with the most significant impact; and direct source linking, with each sentence in the commentary including auditable links to the numbers behind the given assertions, allowing users to navigate between the explanation and the supporting data.

“Our goal at FactSet is to make portfolio managers and research professionals over 50% more efficient at their jobs,” says Rob Robie, executive vice president, head of institutional buy-side at FactSet. “Building on our performance and attribution systems, Portfolio Commentary advances this mission by generating attribution-based insights designed to better evaluate performance, contextualise portfolio attributions and deliver tangible results.”

Portfolio Commentary can be accessed via FactSet’s Portfolio Analysis solution within the FactSet Workstation.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: How to organise, integrate and structure data for successful AI

25 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being rolled out across financial institutions, being put to work in applications that are transforming everything from back-office data management to front-office trading platforms. The potential for AI to bring further cost-savings and operational gains are...

BLOG

Implementing and Understanding Modern Data Architectures: Webinar Preview

The evolution of data use by financial institutions has been accompanied by ever-changing challenges to its management. With technologies such as artificial intelligence enabling firms to prise greater value from their data and to subject it to greater utilisation, a new set of data management practices have emerged. These modern data architectures regard data as...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...