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Morningstar, Inc.
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=== Major Products and Services === The section below describes its top five products by 2021 revenue and some of its other key products and services. ==== ''PitchBook'' ==== PitchBook's main product is the PitchBook Platform, an all-in-one research and analysis workstation for investment and research professionals, including venture capital and private equity firms, corporate development teams, investment banks, limited partners, lenders, law firms, and accounting firms. Clients rely on us for a central, easy-to-use platform that provides access to the broadest and most powerful collection of data and research covering the private capital markets, including venture capital, private equity, and M&A activities.To accommodate our clients' diverse needs, the platform offers company profiles for both private and public companies, advanced search functionality, and other features that help to optimize workflow by surfacing relevant information and insights. Our clients source deals, raise funds, build buyer lists, create benchmarks, and network with the PitchBook Platform. PitchBook also offers a mobile application, CRM integrations, an Excel plug-in, data feeds, and flexible, à la carte data solutions that allow clients to access a variety of data points on demand. Over the course of 2021, Morningstar continued to make significant investments in its data, research, and product capabilities to create the most comprehensive, fast, and intuitive platform experience for its clients. Improvements included enhanced analytics, data, and better search functionality to help both general and limited partners (GPs and LPs) perform diligence on one another. Morningstar released key updates for alternative asset investors, including a new hedge funds dataset that provides a broader view into alternative fund assets. It also added patent data and analytics and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings data to company profiles, and increased the timeliness of its private financials coverage throughout Europe. Morningstar continued to expand its core datasets in venture capital, private equity, M&A, and debt. The company sharpened its geographic focus on Europe, Asia Pacific and Greater China, increasing the number of companies and funds under coverage in these areas. In Greater China, Morningstar now covers the entire flow of capital from LPs to GPs to companies. Morningstar further bolstered its public company data capabilities by introducing new datasets, such as enhanced capital structure data, that give clients the depth of data needed to better determine cost of capital. It also added executive compensation data and earnings calls transcripts to help investors better track management team performance. Additionally, the company extended its modelling and pitch deck creation capabilities with the launch of its MAC/Online Excel Plugin and the release of its PowerPoint plugin. Pricing for the PitchBook Platform is based on the number of seats, with the standard base license fees per user and customized prices for large enterprises, boutiques, and start-up firms. PitchBook's main competitors are CB Insights, Preqin, S&P Capital IQ, and Refinitv. PitchBook is Morningstar's largest product based on revenue and comprised 17.1%, 14.5%, and 12.6% of the company's consolidated revenue in 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. In 2021, the company estimates that its annual revenue renewal rate for PitchBook was approximately 127% versus 115% in 2020. PitchBook had 73,940 licensed users worldwide as of December 31, 2021. ==== ''DBRS Morningstar'' ==== DBRS Morningstar is the fourth largest credit rating agency in the world, offering a wide range of credit rating services and products that contribute to the transparency of international and domestic credit markets. DBRS Morningstar generates its revenue from providing independent credit ratings on financial institutions, corporates, and sovereigns, as well as on securitizations and other structured finance instruments, such as asset-backed securities (ABS), residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) and collateralized loan obligations (CLO). The credit analysis and the assignment of credit ratings can take place on issuance of new bonds or on a continuous basis for existing credit exposures. The fees to the issuer are based on the type of issuance, the size of the transaction, and the complexity of the analysis. Credit ratings are forward-looking opinions on credit risk that reflect the creditworthiness of a company or fixed-income security. They are determined within the framework of a ratings committee that represents a collective assessment of DBRS Morningstar’s opinion rather than the opinion of an individual analyst. These credit ratings are based on information that incorporates both global and local considerations and the use of approved methodologies, and are determined in compliance with policies and procedures designed to avoid or manage conflicts of interest. DBRS Morningstar’s credit rating methodologies are publicly available and support the objectivity and integrity of the credit rating process. DBRS Morningstar also offers a micro-website dedicated to ESG factors deemed relevant to credit ratings analysis. During 2021, Morningstar expanded the way it interacts with issuers and investors by launching a new credit solution provider, Morningstar Credit Information and Analytics (MCIA), that is separate from DBRS Morningstar and which offers credit products and services beyond credit ratings. DealView, a commercial mortgage-bond monitoring service, is a product sold by MCIA. Longer term, MCIA plans to offer modular credit information products that leverage the company's credit expertise and embed in the workflows of internal and external customers. DBRS Morningstar competes with several other firms, including Fitch, Kroll Bond Ratings, Moody’s, and S&P Global Ratings. DBRS Morningstar is our second-largest product based on revenue and accounted for 16.0%, 14.9%, and 10.8% of our consolidated revenue in 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. For 2021, Morningstar estimates that transaction-based fees comprised 66% of DBRS Morningstar's revenue; the remainder can be classified as transaction-related, or revenue generated by annual fees tied to surveillance, research, and other services. ==== ''Morningstar Data'' ==== Morningstar Data provides institutions with access to a full range of investment data spanning numerous databases, including equity fundamentals, managed investments, fixed income, ESG factors, and market data (such as end-of-day and intra-day pricing, as well as historical tick data). Morningstar aims to match what investors hold in their portfolios with the raw data it's acquired and analytical insights that it derives. The company is well-known for enriching managed investment raw data with research driven intellectual property, resulting in proprietary statistics, such as the Morningstar Category, Morningstar Style Box, and Morningstar Rating, which it distributes through licensed data feeds. Morningstar also offers a wide range of other data, including information on investment performance, risk analytics, full historical portfolio holdings, operations data (such as managed investments' fees and expenses), cash flows, financial statement data, consolidated industry statistics, and investment ownership. Our breadth of global coverage between proprietary and fundamental datasets allows us to combine our datasets and analytical capabilities as a holistic offering. Our clients typically serve retail investors and their intermediaries, and they use Morningstar Data for a variety of investor communications, including websites, print publications, and marketing fact sheets, as well as for internal research and product development. Demand for Morningstar Data increases as clients build digital solutions, prepare for regulatory requirements, and incorporate automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other forms of data analytics into their workflows. The Morningstar Data team applies emerging methods in artificial intelligence to regression, classification, deep learning, natural language processing, and optical character recognition to extract data from structured and unstructured content. The Data team uses a "human in the loop" approach where machine inferences are presented to a Data Analyst for validation. Validated data is published in Morningstar products and used to retrain and continuously improve the Data team's machine learning models. This approach enables Morningstar to produce data faster without compromising the quality of data that our clients use in making sound investment decisions. In 2021, Morningstar launched new data sets relating to asset management firms’ diversity and DEI-related policies and practices to support clients’ manager selection processes. The company enriched its multi-asset portfolio construction and due diligence analytics with the release of expanded economic exposure data and twelve new fixed income data sets, including option-adjusted analytics, average credit ratings, fixed income sector and country of risk breakdowns. Morningstar increased coverage of model portfolios by 87% to over 2,400 models and released nineteen new model portfolio data points. Morningstar is continuing to migrate users to the cloud-based Data Services delivery system it launched in 2020. This new system allows users to more easily explore our data capabilities, access the data they specifically want, and have flexibility around format and delivery options. The delivery platform connects data sets across portfolios, corporate entities and underlying instruments, delivering consolidated feeds and improving our customers’ end-to-end user experience. Morningstar will further enhance the data delivery experience for users who wish to configure data sets within Direct or transform data within Analytics Lab, so that data feeds of such content can be more efficiently created by clients and embedded in their wider business workflows. In 2022, Morningstar is also launching new regulatory data offerings in response to global investor protection, capital adequacy and sustainability regulations, as well as new data management offerings to support its asset management and wealth management clients, by driving connectivity across their business functions, and will also expand its asset class coverage to capitalize on the rising importance of alternatives in investment portfolios. Pricing for Morningstar Data is based on the number of investment vehicles covered, the amount of information provided for each security, the frequency of updates, the method of delivery, the size of the licensing firm, the level of distribution, and the intended use by the client, otherwise known as the “use-case.” Morningstar's main global competitors for mutual fund data include Refinitiv and FE fundinfo. The company also competes against smaller players that focus on local or regional information. For market and equity data, Morningstar primarily competes with FactSet, S&P Global, ICE Data Services, Bloomberg, and Refinitiv. Morningstar Data is the company's third-largest product based on revenue and accounted for 14.3%, 15.5%, and 16.7% of its consolidated revenue in 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. The company estimates that the annual revenue renewal rate for Morningstar Data in 2021 was approximately 100% versus 101% in 2020. ==== ''Morningstar Direct'' ==== Morningstar Direct is an investment-analysis platform that delivers rich data and analytics across asset classes, built on Morningstar's global database of both registered and non-registered securities, as well as data from third-party providers. Users can create advanced performance comparisons and in-depth analysis of an investment's underlying investment style, as well as custom-branded reports and presentations. Morningstar Direct helps equity and multi-asset strategy asset managers with market research, product positioning, competitive analysis, and distribution strategies, whereas wealth managers predominately use the tool to assist with manager research, fund selection, and the construction, monitoring, and distribution of model portfolios. In 2021, Morningstar Direct began executing against a new product strategy centered on the ongoing evolution of regulatory standards, the mass consumption of data through automation, and rising interest in ESG and personalized investments. Some of the key platform enhancements resulting from the strategy include the launch of Analytics Lab, the execution of our unified Direct experience, and the release of new datasets, insights, and analytics embedding ESG more deeply throughout client workflows. Analytics Lab is the new big data analytics platform within Morningstar Direct that integrates Jupyter Notebook, an open-source technology, with Morningstar’s proprietary data, research, and investment and portfolio objects. Analytics Lab allows our clients to explore and discover insights from a library of standardized datasets and analytical flows delivered as Notebooks. Our vision is to grant clients access to the open environment, enabling firms to programmatically build custom analytics by integrating their data with Morningstar Direct data and share those automated workflows within their firm. In 2021, Morningstar introduced a robust collection of new ESG capabilities to aid financial professionals to better fit sustainability within their workflow. Some of these enhancements include ESG groupings within asset flows, European Union (EU) Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) article 8 and article 9 designations, Commitment level data, Security Globes, Risk Ratings, and Product Involvement metrics. These are a mixture of data points, research, and ratings, all with the goal of helping to communicate complex data and analysis in manner that is easy for investors to understand and act upon. Morningstar also released new reporting templates in Direct's Presentation Studio that enable clients to communicate their unique ESG stories. Pricing for Morningstar Direct is based on the number of licenses purchased. Morningstar has simplified its licensing model to eliminate add-on features in an effort to maximize its customer experience and allow users to extract more value from its products. Morningstar Direct's primary competitors are Bloomberg, eVestment Alliance, FactSet Research System’s Cognity and SPAR, Zephyr, Strategic Insight’s Simfund, and Refinitiv’s Eikon. Morningstar Direct is the company's fourth-largest product based on revenue and accounted for 10.2%, 11.4%, and 12.6% of its consolidated revenue in 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. Morningstar estimates that its annual revenue renewal rate for Morningstar Direct in 2021 was approximately 97% versus 96% in 2020. Morningstar Direct had 17,421 licensed users worldwide as of December 31, 2021. ==== ''Investment Management'' ==== Investment Management’s flagship offering is Morningstar® Managed PortfoliosSM, an advisor service consisting of model portfolios designed for fee-based independent financial advisors. Its core markets are the U.S., U.K., South Africa, Australia, and India. Morningstar targets like-minded advisors that hire the company to manage a substantial portion of their client’s assets the Morningstar way—putting investors first, keeping costs low, and investing for the long-term. Morningstar builds its multi-asset strategies using mutual funds, ETFs, and individual securities, and tailor them to meet specific investment time horizons, risk levels, and projected outcomes. In 2021, Morningstar surpassed $1 billion in global net flows across its Managed Portfolios. Morningstar Managed Portfolios are available through two core distribution channels: its fee-based discretionary asset management service, also known as a turnkey asset management program (TAMP), or as strategist models on third-party managed account platforms. Morningstar charges asset-based program fees for Managed Portfolios, which are typically based on the distribution channel (i.e., TAMP versus strategist models) and the products contained within the portfolios. Morningstar has TAMPs available in the U.S. and India, and act as a fund and model provider in its other international markets. Morningstar's TAMP is an end-to-end digital investing experience, in which advisors access its model portfolios through a proprietary wealth management platform that offers functionality, such as risk assessments, proposals, digital account opening and ongoing management, client reporting, customer support, marketing services, and back-office features, such as trading and billing services. Using its TAMP allows the advisor to share fiduciary responsibility with Morningstar. In 2021, Morningstar agreed to acquire Praemium’s U.K. and international wealth management platform business. Praemium offers proprietary, friction-free, SaaS-based technology and services that allow fee-based advisors to outsource key elements of the advice workflow. The platform will enable Morningstar to expand its wealth management platform capabilities internationally beyond the U.S. and India. Morningstar expects this transaction to close mid-to-late 2022, subject to regulatory approval. Morningstar continued to enhance the advisor and client experience on its TAMP, primarily augmenting customer support with a digital self-service help center, document submission, and case tracking center. The company plans to launch direct indexing capabilities through the TAMP later in 2022, as part of its recently-announced strategy to build a comprehensive Wealth Management platform leveraging capabilities from Morningstar Office, ByAllAccounts, and Morningstar.com. Finally, Morningstar continued to see positive flows in its ESG-focused portfolios as an increasing number of advisors and their investor clients sought investment solutions aligned with their sustainable investing inclinations. In addition to Morningstar Managed Portfolios, other services it provides include institutional asset-management (e.g., act as a subadvisor) and asset-allocation services for asset managers, broker/dealers, and insurance providers. Morningstar offers these services through a variety of registered entities in Australia, Canada, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), France, India, Japan, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. Morningstar bases pricing for institutional asset-management and asset-allocation services on the scope of work, its degree of investment discretion, and the level of service required. For most of its contracts, Morningstar receives asset-based fees. For Morningstar Managed Portfolios offered through its TAMP, Morningstar's primary competitors are AssetMark, Orion/Brinker Capital, and SEI Investments. Its primary strategist offering competitors are Blackrock, Russell, and Vanguard in the U.S., and it faces competition from Financial Express and Tatton in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Blackrock, Dimensional, and Vanguard in Australia. Morningstar also competes with in-house research teams at independent broker/dealers who build proprietary portfolios for use on brokerage firm platforms, as well other registered investment advisors that provide investment strategies or models on these platforms. Morningstar Investment Management is the company's fifth-largest product based on revenue and comprised 7.4%, 8.5%, and 9.8% of its consolidated revenue in 2021, 2020, and 2019, respectively. ==== ''Workplace Solutions'' ==== Morningstar Workplace Solutions includes several different offerings, including managed retirement accounts (MRA), fiduciary services, Morningstar Lifetime Allocation Funds, and custom models. Delivered primarily through the Morningstar Retirement Manager platform, our MRA program helps retirement plan participants define, track, and achieve their retirement goals. As part of this service, we deliver personalized recommendations for a target retirement income goal, a recommended contribution rate to help achieve that goal, a portfolio mix based on our Total Wealth methodology, and specific investment recommendations. We then manage the participant’s investment portfolio for them, assuming full discretionary control. We also offer Advisor Managed Accounts, a program that allows advisor firms to specify and assume fiduciary responsibility for the underlying portfolios that are used within MRA. We do not hold assets in custody for the MRA we provide. Our main competitors in MRA are Edelman/Financial Engines, Fidelity, and NextCapital. Companies that provide automated investment advice to consumers, such as Betterment and Wealthfront, are also attempting to break into employer-sponsored retirement markets. In our fiduciary services offering, we help plan sponsors build out and manage an appropriate investment lineup for their participants while helping to mitigate their fiduciary risk. Morningstar Plan Advantage is an extension of our fiduciary services that includes a technology platform that enables advisors at broker/dealer firms to more easily offer fiduciary protection, provider pricing, and investment reporting services to their plan sponsor clients. Our main competitors in fiduciary services are Mesirow and Wilshire Associates, but we are starting to see growing competition from smaller players, such as LeafHouse Financial and IRON Financial. Broker/dealers are also looking to introduce their own fiduciary services distributed through their advisors. With its custom models, Morningstar offers two different services. Morningstar works with retirement plan record-keepers to design scalable offerings for their investment line-ups, including target maturity models and risk-based models. Morningstar also provides custom model services direct to large plan sponsors, creating target date funds that are customized around a plan’s participant demographics and investment menus. For custom models, Morningstar often competes with retirement plan consultants. Morningstar also serves as a non-discretionary sub-advisor and index provider for the Morningstar Lifetime Allocation Funds, a series of target-date CITs offered by UBS Asset Management to retirement plan sponsors. Retirement plan sponsors can select a conservative, moderate, or growth version of the glide path for the funds based on the needs of participants in the plan. For the Lifetime Allocation Funds, Morningstar competes with other providers of target-date funds. In 2021, Morningstar expanded its relationships with eight key retirement RIA clients, giving it a total of 15 RIA clients signed on to use its Advisor Managed Accounts offering. As an extension of its fiduciary services offering, Morningstar also announced the Morningstar ESG Pooled Employer Plan (PEP), which is slated to be launched in early 2022. The PEP is designed to help employees mitigate ESG risk in their retirement portfolios. Pricing for Workplace Solutions is generally asset-based and depends on several factors, including the level of services offered (including whether the services involve acting as a fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA), the number of participants, the level of systems integration required, total assets under management or advisement, and the availability of competing products. ==== ''Morningstar Advisor Workstation'' ==== Morningstar Advisor Workstation is a web-based research, financial planning, and proposal generation platform that illustrates financial decision trade-offs using our data, research, and robust portfolio analytics. The software is typically sold through an enterprise contract and is primarily for retail advisors due to its strong ties and integrations with home-office applications and processes and a library of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)-reviewed reports for compliance needs. It allows advisors to build and maintain a client portfolio database that can be fully integrated with the home-office firm's back-office technology and resources. This helps advisors present and clearly illustrate their portfolio investment strategies and show the value of their advice. In 2021, Morningstar continued to improve its financial planning workflow by focusing on the Morningstar Risk Ecosystem, a financial planning tool that extends Advisor Workstation’s investment planning and proposal generation capabilities. These capabilities are becoming more important to the market as planning grows more central to the value advisors deliver to clients and regulations put more focus on ensuring investment plans are well suited to investor goals. Morningstar also launched IDA, a new in-product ‘Intelligent Digital Assistant’ that has improved client retention through enhanced ways to engage, train, and collect feedback from its users. Advisors can access client portfolios within the companion app or the web version of Morningstar Advisor Workstation to perform analysis, generate client reports, and illustrate decision trade-offs with ease. Throughout 2021, Morningstar continued to invest in capabilities to modernize advice and address regulatory changes, including the U.S. SEC’s Regulation Best Interest and the Canadian CSA’s Client Focused Reforms. This included a dedicated workflow to address the “Care Obligation,” which helps advisors find and track their consideration of reasonably available alternatives. Pricing for Morningstar Advisor Workstation varies based on the number of users, as well as the number of databases licensed and level of functionality. Morningstar charges fixed annual fees per licensed user for a base configuration of Morningstar Advisor Workstation, but pricing varies significantly based on the scope of the license. Competitors for Morningstar Advisor Workstation include AdvisoryWorld (LPL Financial), YCharts, Riskalyze, ASI, Kwanti, and Financial Express outside of the U.S. Occasionally, broker/dealers also decide to build their own internal tools and attempt to bring their advisors’ practice management tools in-house. Morningstar estimates that its annual revenue renewal rate for Advisor Workstation for 2021 was approximately 92% versus 91% in 2020. As of December 31, 2021, 232 companies held licenses for the enterprise version of Morningstar Advisor Workstation in the U.S. and Canada. ==== ''Sustainalytics'' ==== Sustainalytics provides ESG data, research, analysis and insights to institutional investors globally, covering equity and fixed income asset classes. Its flagship ESG Ratings also underpin Morningstar’s Sustainability Fund Ratings for mutual funds and ETFs, multiple investable indexes and numerous investment platforms. Sustainalytics also serves issuers and banking institutions through its corporate solutions unit and is notably the world’s largest provider of green bond Second Party Opinions. The EU Action Plan is a broad sweeping regulation with multiple components that require asset managers to align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and report on portfolio alignment. Investors need high quality ESG research, data and reporting tools to help them comply with the regulation’s components: EU Taxonomy Regulation, SFDR, and EU Benchmarks Regulation. In 2021, Sustainalytics launched several new products under its EU Action Plan Solutions suite, addressing the need for clients to access research and comply with reporting under recently-enacted European regulations. To help investors fulfil sustainable finance disclosure requirements, Morningstar delivered a rich new dataset emphasizing principle adverse indicators (PAIs) that cover sustainability factors and risks. Morningstar also launched a new product providing an holistic view of an investment portfolio's alignment to the EU Taxonomy. For institutional investor clients, Morningstar also worked to incorporate impact metrics and country risk ratings into the Morningstar Sustainability Rating for funds. Corporate issuers were introduced to a new Sustainalytics solution designed to assess ESG risk in a company’s supply chain and to a new Issuer Gateway portal that enables more efficient communication and engagement between the issuers and Sustainalytics. Sustainalytics also expanded its Second-Party Opinions coverage to support companies looking to issue Sustainability-Linked Bonds, and increased the number of publicly-available company-level ESG Risk Ratings to over 14,000. Sustainalytics operates on a subscription-based pricing model for its ESG research products, which supports recurring revenue. The corporate solutions unit deploys a model that combines one-time revenue with subscription-based recurring licensing revenue. Major competitors for Sustainalytics include MSCI, FTSE Russell, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), S&P Global, Moody's, ecovadis, and Federated Hermes. While the traditional ESG research market continues to aggressively consolidate, Morningstar expects that the market will continue to evolve as new entrants emerge and investors acquire ESG data from new distributors (for example, directly from stock exchanges). Large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, UBS, and JP Morgan are also investing heavily to build in-house ESG capabilities and sustainable investing products. New technologies, specifically those that employ artificial intelligence, are facilitating these trends by accelerating the sourcing and use of unstructured ESG data. ==== ''Morningstar.com'' ==== Our largest website, Morningstar.com, helps individual investors discover, evaluate, and monitor stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds; build and monitor portfolios; and monitor the markets. Revenue is generated from paid memberships through Morningstar Premium and Internet advertising sales. Our Morningstar Premium offering is focused on bringing clarity and confidence to investment decisions. Members have access to proprietary Morningstar research, ratings, data, and tools, including analyst reports, portfolio management tools (such as Portfolio X-Ray), and stock and fund screeners. We offer Premium Membership services in Australia, Canada, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. Unlike many consumer-facing websites, Morningstar.com sells ad space directly to advertisers. This approach allows us to build meaningful relationships with our advertisers and helps us protect the integrity of our brand. In our experience, advertisers continue to support Morningstar.com because of our commitment to transparency and clarity. In 2021, we made various upgrades to the technology platform supporting Morningstar.com, which provide improved uptime, faster performance, increased content personalization based on readership behaviour, and cost savings in website maintenance. We also further developed our new individual investor digital portfolio management and research tool. Individuals can now leverage the same account aggregation technology used by advisors (By All Accounts) to seamlessly match their investment holdings with our data and proprietary research content to help them better understand what they own across their full portfolio, find new investment ideas, and make more informed investment decisions. We charge a monthly, annual, or multiyear subscription fee for Morningstar.com's Premium Membership service. Morningstar.com primarily competes with trading platforms that concurrently offer research and investing advice, such as Fidelity, Schwab, and TD Ameritrade. Research sites, such as The Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, and Zacks Investment Research, also compete with us for paid membership. In addition, free or “freemium” websites, such as Yahoo Finance, Dow Jones/Marketwatch, The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger, and TheStreet.com, all compete for the advertising dollars of entities wishing to reach an engaged audience of investors. As of December 31, 2021, Morningstar.com had more than 115,000 paid Premium members in the U.S. plus an additional 15,600 Premium members across other global markets. ==== ''Morningstar Indexes'' ==== Morningstar offers a broad range of market indexes that can be used as performance benchmarks and as the basis of investment products and other portfolio strategies. Drawing on Morningstar's deep intellectual property and focus on the end investor, our indexes track all major global regions and asset classes, including equity, fixed income, and multi-asset. We believe investors today are looking for better value from their index provider. This means two things. First, broad market cap indexes for benchmarking purposes, arguably a commodity, should be inexpensive. Second, strategic beta indexes for investment strategies, of growing importance to all investors, should be unique, research-driven and deliver better outcomes to investors. We are responding to this need by offering core beta benchmarks while delivering our Morningstar research and insights through unique and differentiated strategic beta indexes. Morningstar Indexes was active on several fronts in 2021. We added and expanded on several high-profile collaborations with marquee global clients such as BlackRock iShares, Jackson National Life and Engine #1. We acquired Moorgate Benchmarks in September to build on our European indexes client service platform and global index customization capabilities. In addition, we introduced a number of innovative thematic and ESG index products to support investors, drawing on the strengths of Morningstar through our internal collaboration with the Morningstar Equity Research and Sustainalytics teams. We license Morningstar Indexes to numerous institutions that offer ETFs, exchange-traded notes, mutual funds and separately managed accounts based on the indexes. Firms license Morningstar Indexes for both product creation (where we typically receive the greater of a minimum fee or basis points tied to assets under management) and data licensing (where we typically receive annual licensing fees). In both cases, our pricing varies based on the level of distribution, the type of user, and the specific indexes licensed. Major competitors for Morningstar Indexes include MSCI, FTSE Russell, S&P Dow Jones Indices (offered through S&P Global), and Bloomberg Indices.
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