FactSet Research Systems Inc. FDS

The business

FactSet rents a workstation and a data feed to people who manage money. A portfolio manager pulls up company financials, screens a universe, runs attribution on last quarter's performance. A banker builds a comparables table. A wealth advisor generates a client report. All of it is annual subscription, invoiced ahead, renewed by default because moving a research team off a platform is a project nobody volunteers for.

The company sells to 9,130 clients across 247,766 seats, and the two numbers grew very differently last year: clients up 3.6%, users up 12.4%. The moat is switching cost measured in analyst hours, and the vulnerability is that it is priced per seat in an industry that periodically decides it has too many seats.