Risk.net 03 Feb 2021 Jonathan Reeve, FactSet Alternative data can provide enlightening insights, revealing hidden sources of alpha as well as risks, but it is also cumbersome, voluminous, unstructured and complex. To enable buy- and sell-side clients to navigate and capitalise on this information, FactSet dedicates more than half of its global organisation to data integrity and concordance. The resulting content feeds its workstation analytics and is also available via data feeds, application programming interfaces and public cloud environments. FactSet’s alternative content includes the Revere Business Industry Classification System (RBICS) with Tradenames that maps more than 170,000 products, services and brands to the granular sectors of the RBICS taxonomy. Shipping data, based on the daily processing of over 35,000 bills of lading, provides insights into complex global supply chains of more than 200,000 companies. Global sanctions data combines the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions lists and other global restricted lists to enable users to monitor companies and individuals. Geographic Revenue Exposure provides a structured and normalised display of companies’ revenues by geography, as well as giving the geographic footprint of companies based on sources of revenue versus country of domicile, and analysing global revenue exposures at the company, index or portfolio level. Supply Chain Relationships provides information on the complex networks of companies’ key customers, suppliers, competitors and strategic partners. Documents Distributor XML Transcripts analyses sentiment and uses natural language processing to deliver unstructured data on corporate events such as earnings calls and releases, investor and shareholder meetings, and mergers and acquisitions activity.