FactSet’s acquisition of BCC Group International (bccg) brings the data and analytics provider further into the infrastructure layer underpinning institutional market data, as financial firms reassess architectures built around legacy distribution platforms.
Announced last week, the deal brings bccg’s ONE Platform into FactSet’s Real-Time Solution Suite, combining FactSet’s real-time, historical and reference data capabilities with technology for ingesting, managing, entitling and distributing market data across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments.The acquisition builds on a partnership between the two companies dating back to 2021. By bringing bccg in-house, FactSet is positioning itself to manage a broader portion of the enterprise market data lifecycle, while retaining the ability to work with third-party content and technology.
From partnership to platform
According to Sonia Greenberg, Director of Real-Time Solutions at FactSet, the decision to acquire bccg grew directly out of the companies’ joint experience implementing the technology.
“FactSet and bccg coming together was driven by solving a market problem,” she tells TradingTech Insight. “At a top 10 global investment management firm, we combined FactSet’s Real-Time, Historical and Reference Data with the ONE Platform’s underlying technology to help our client move off legacy, on-premises infrastructure, all entirely anchored by FactSet’s support and management model.”
The project, she says, saved the client more than $1 million in hardware costs while improving performance and throughput, with the migration aligned to the firm’s own cloud timetable.
“That success told us our joint solution was right,” she adds. “Together, we wanted to remove the friction from the process, allowing us to partner deeper and execute on behalf of all our clients faster.”
The acquisition now allows FactSet to take on a wider role in clients’ market data environments, with the extent of that role varying according to the institution.
“Some clients want the building blocks: the static content, the feeds, the entitlements, and they’ll manage the rest themselves,” says Greenberg. “Others want the full platform, fully managed, so they can step back from infrastructure entirely. We’re architected and built to meet clients wherever they are on that spectrum and work with their ecosystem of partners.”
Enterprise market data environments typically draw information from multiple exchanges, vendors and proprietary sources. FactSet says the ONE Platform can provide centralised entitlements, governance, reporting and cost controls while remaining source-neutral.Modernising without ripping out the stack
For established banks and asset managers, modernising market data infrastructure is rarely a clean-sheet exercise. Existing platforms can support large numbers of applications and users, often with decades of integration work built around them.
Greenberg cites former bccg president Bill Bierds’ description of changing market data platforms as “open heart surgery”.
“We can move at the client’s pace and in lockstep with their technical needs,” she says. “For example, we have adaptors and ontologies that let FactSet clients either use FactSet data directly within their existing market data platform, or translate their existing data into the ONE Platform, so there’s no requirement to rip anything out on day one.”
This allows migration to take place across individual components or workloads over time, rather than requiring wholesale replacement from the outset.
Cloud adoption has already changed the way firms approach financial technology architecture, with firms increasingly seeking control over where individual workloads run and how different components interact.
Infrastructure for an always-on market
Market structure is adding further pressure to existing infrastructure. Trading hours are extending, settlement cycles are compressing and automated systems are consuming data in new ways.
“Twenty-four-hour trading adds volume, while squeezing maintenance and update windows from overnight down to just an hour,” says Greenberg. “Then, there’s the move toward tokenisation, which is shifting settlement from T+1 toward instantaneous. In parallel, clients expect AI to drive both productivity gains and new data consumption models.”
Such changes require a governed data platform that can scale without manual provisioning for every new use case, says Greenberg, adding: “These shifts make data governance, reporting and audit trails more crucial than ever before.”
FactSet has been addressing similar issues in its work around agentic AI. Gerard Miller, SVP, Agentic Strategy at FactSet, recently told our sister publication Market & Alternative Data Insight that financial data increasingly needs to be delivered with sufficient context and structure for AI systems to understand and use it reliably, placing greater emphasis on provenance and the information surrounding the underlying data.
The real-time data layer is consequently being asked to support higher volumes, longer operating hours, more distributed technology estates and new forms of automated consumption.
With bccg, FactSet can provide more of the technology through which that data is controlled and distributed, alongside the data itself. Its approach allows institutions to retain third-party content and existing technology while moving individual parts of their infrastructure onto the ONE Platform.
For institutions that have spent years assembling multi-vendor market data environments, modernisation is likely to remain incremental. Their ability to preserve control over data sources, deployment models and technology components will shape how quickly they can replace legacy infrastructure as trading hours extend and machine-driven data consumption grows.
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