Company and Executive Information Services - What is Factiva Offering?
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

Chris Porter continues FreePint’s collection of reviews of company and executive information services by exploring the Companies & Executives component of the Dow Jones Factiva service.

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As announced in a recent article, FreePint is putting together a new collection of product reviews and articles looking at ways of researching company information. A number of reviews in the collection will look in particular at the extent to which providers integrate profile information and news.

The introductory article commented that service providers have followed different journeys towards their goal. Some vendors have their origins as specialists in the provision of structured company profiles and have extended their capabilities to cover news as well; others have taken the opposite route.

Integrated News and Company Information

Dow Jones Factiva clearly falls into the latter category - the vendor first established itself as a global business news aggregator, then moved to extend its appeal by adding data and capabilities which, at the time, were more usually the domain of separate services such as OneSource or Hoover's.

For a while, Dow Jones positioned its company and executive capabilities as distinct offerings, even at one point running a separate business division to promote them.

FreePint subscribers may well be happy to know that this approach is no longer followed and the Companies & Executives capabilities are now integrated as part of the standard Factiva package.

Assessing the Product: Key Questions

The question still arises as to just how good the data and capabilities are. In assessing the suitability of the service, a specialised researcher may be asking themselves:

• What level of financial detail can I expect to find in a quoted-company profile?

• How on the ball is the vendor in picking up on company filing detail about pending or recently completed IPOs?

• Is the vendor putting most of its energies into covering the major companies in the most familiar geographies, or is it (and its key information provider) also keeping an eye on emerging markets and small and mid-cap listings?

• If I am looking at a profile of a privately held company, in a country where it is the norm for such an entity to publish its financials, what do I generally expect to find on this service - full multi-year financial history, just a one-year figure or no numbers at all?

• If I want to hop from a company profile to related news, how easy is it to do that and how rich, how deep and how global is the content likely to be?

• And can I then follow my nose and perform further news-based research, or do I have to go off and start the process all over again, in some other part of the product?

FreePint's latest review of the Companies & Executives component within Factiva takes a very detailed look at all these issues and comes to some very clear conclusions. That the service scores highly for its news-based search may only be expected; some of the other findings may come as a pleasant surprise.

And in the pipeline: keep an eye out for updates on Bureau van Dijk Orbis, Mergent Online and more...

Editor's Note

Factiva Companies & Executives has a host of interesting features. The full FreePint Report: Product Review of Factiva Companies & Executives is now available in PDF format, in a convenient package for reference and sharing, for those with a FreePint Subscription.

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