Morningstar has always taken the approach that the data, research, ratings and other content that we provide investors can and should be consumed however our clients want to consume it. Clients can license data from us through Morningstar Data, or they can view and analyze that data through one of our proprietary platforms like Morningstar Direct. Factset and Bloomberg are indeed competitors, but they also redistribute some of our proprietary data to their clients and pay us to use it in their products. We have the ability to extract value from our offerings no matter the distribution channel, which underscores the need we ultimately fill in the value chain.
We overlap with Factset and Bloomberg in certain areas such as portfolio analytics, ETF data, fundamental equity data, base fixed income data, and risk analyses. From a platform standpoint, however, Morningstar Direct stands out with Presentation Studio, which is a dynamic report creation tool that allows users to package our proprietary data into proposals and other deliverables for clients.