British banking giant Barclays has teamed up with FinTech company FactSet to improve how it leverages data across its products and services.

The companies have signed a strategic agreement aimed at accelerating Barclays’ market data strategy over the next few years.

The move aims to help Barclays provide its global customers with “enhanced, data-driven solutions”, enabled by advanced analytics technology.

Through the partnership, Barclays will have access to a range of products, market research and tools for working with data to better inform the data-based products offered by the bank.

Georges Lauchard, chief operating officer at Barclays’ investment banking arm, said the partnership highlights the changing dynamic between market data providers like FactSet and their customers.

“Market data is undergoing an intense period of change whereby customers of market data providers are evolving from consumers to co-creators of capabilities to yield competitive insights,” he explained.

Barclays has also been offered a place on the FactSet client advisory board, which the companies say will help them collaborate closely on shaping future data and technology solutions to better serve the industry.

Founded by Howard Wille and Charles J. Snyder in the 70s after meeting as co-workers at a Wall Street-based investment bank, FactSet started life as a “fact set” - a paper sheet of facts on a specific company that was developed on a mainframe computer by drawing on data from several research providers and delivered to customers, often financial professionals, by bike.

As the personal computer began to take off in the years following FactSet’s birth, Wille and Snyder were able to begin offering their fact sheets digitally. Today, the company offers financial data and tools to more than 9,000 customers worldwide and is increasingly leveraging AI to help customers make sense of large datasets.

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