Simpson finds a smooth path for FactSet’s new chief

Natalia Stansall
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David Simpson, the first employee in Australia for FactSet, who opened the Sydney office in 1998, has retired from the firm to be replaced by another experienced data and technology executive, Natalia Stansall, who recently finished up at MSCI Inc after 15 years there.

The transition was completed earlier this month with Stansall formally taking the reins following a two-week induction. The two have known each other and each other’s companies for years, and have both competed and collaborated on many occasions, and Stansall says she was attracted to her new role by FactSet’s culture as well as market presence and breadth of solutions.

Simpson built the Australian operation from one to about 80 staff, which is roughly in line with FactSet’s global growth over the past 20-odd years, to now have more than 10,000 employees around the world.

Stansall, of Russian heritage, started her career in sales at Bloomberg in London, where she completed her tertiary education, including an MBA, after initially considering a musical career. Daughter of a high-school Maths teacher and a University Physics and Chemistry lecturer, Stansall had studied piano for four years at the State Conservatorium in Odessa before deciding that being a music teacher was not for her.

She moved to Australia with her family and joined what was known as MSCI Barra in Sydney in 2004, finishing up as Executive Director, Client Coverage, last month.

Stansall said she now wanted a change to a role that involved more people management, which was the part of her work she enjoyed most.

“My dream has been to manage people so that I could support their development and growth,” she said. “My focus has always been on people. Over the past 20+ years I’ve enjoyed working with clients to provide them with solutions to their problems. Just as I knew that life as a pianist was not for me, I knew that working with and leading people to help us all achieve our goals, was.”

After going through a year like no other in its reliance on technology and following the upheavals suffered by businesses of all sorts, Stansall said that before the impact of COVID-19 was felt many businesses in financial services were already thinking about the future of technology and data and what it meant for them.

“Most clients are in various stages of considering their digital transformation, and COVID accelerated the need to think about what the future workplace will be like and what data and technology is needed,” she said. “FactSet has solutions spanning front-to-back of the investment lifecycle, as well as openness and flexibility of the platform to offer the best of breed environment to our clients. We want to help our clients who are on their digital transformation journeys to design a target operating model that aligns with their strategy. My role, also, is to help our team to think of an overall solution for a client rather than about individual offerings.”

For his part, Simpson said he began thinking about taking a long break and trying something new about two years ago. He intends for that long break to be at least a year without the stresses and strains that go with running a business.

Simpson, who grew up in Belfast, also started his career in London, in surveying, but decided to get out of the property industry after the slump of the early 1990s (during Australia’s “recession we had to have”) and moved into IT at a data and technology company. When he came to Australia, he joined one of FactSet’s competitors before leaving to take the opportunity the expanding US-based FactSet offered him.

He likes to tell the story of how he first met the current chief executive of FactSet, Philip Snow, based at head office in Norwalk, Connecticut. Snow was already at FactSet and came to Australia for a year to work with Simpson to help set up in Sydney. He acted as a technical consultant.

FactSet has a lot of solutions on offer for a range of business needs. It acquires, integrates and manages financial data and analytics, with thousands of datasets, of which about two dozen are exclusive, and aggregates content from thousands of third-party data providers. It also has a range of trading, portfolio analytics, risk management and research tools on offer, in addition to a dedicated offering for wealth managers. The company has an office in Melbourne as well as Sydney and services New Zealand from this side of the Tasman.

– G.B.

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