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FactSet Expands GenAI Offerings with Portfolio Commentary

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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.

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