Facteus Makes Consumer-Spend Data Available in Real Time via Bloomberg Terminal

Consumer-spend data provider Facteus (formerly known as ARM Insight) is making information from its Facteus Insight Report on consumer Spending and Transactions (FIRST) available via the Bloomberg Professional terminal, under an agreement with the data giant to carry Facteus’ content.

The data is available as part of the macroeconomic indicators section of the terminal, and is available to all Bloomberg Professional subscribers.

The data available via Bloomberg will contain information from the FIRST report, but curated and categorized, tailored to Bloomberg’s client base.

“We worked with the Bloomberg team to understand what’s best for their customers, and we selected the categories they thought would be of most interest to their customers, then packaged that for easy access through the terminal. It’s the same data, but curated slightly differently,” says Lorn Davis, vice president of corporate and product strategy at Facteus. “The team at Bloomberg was interested in high-level macro indicators. So we broke our existing report into more categories, to be more granular.”

The data in the FIRST report focuses on lower-middle-income consumers, and captures data from millions of consumer transactions sourced from financial institutions, financial technology vendors, and payment service providers, including credit and debit card purchases, and transactions from payroll and corporate expense accounts.

“For companies like Walmart, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General, this represents a large chunk of their consumer base. And, for example, stimulus checks had an impact on that consumer base. So the money driving the economy right now is coming from those consumers,” Davis says. “But right now, there’s a gap in knowledge about spending among lower-middle-income consumers, which is one of the largest consumer groups. And a lot of our clients among investment managers are interested in understanding the input of this consumer group. We see continued appetite for this kind of consumer spending data. Interest in understanding how spending affects individual company names is still very robust, but—as with Bloomberg—there’s a lot of interest in these macro indicators, and how they show what parts of the economy are moving faster or lagging.”

A key difference is that the data on the Bloomberg terminal is real-time, whereas the FIRST report is distributed weekly. “We’ve always captured the data in real-time. The difference is the format and the audience we’re trying to capture with the FIRST report, which lends itself better to a weekly cadence, whereas the use cases in the terminal lend themselves to a more frequent refresh rate,” Davis says.

Core readers of the FIRST report include asset managers, business owners wanting to understand how consumer spending affects their industry, consultants, and marketing professionals. “It covers a lot of the business world, because consumer behavior drives 60% of the economy, whereas Bloomberg’s customer base is almost exclusively financial, and therefore interested in understanding that at a more granular and timely level,” Davis adds.

The vendors rolled out the initial data onto the Bloomberg terminal last month, and plan to upgrade it to real-time data soon. The data-sharing agreement is the first time Facteus has worked with Bloomberg, but is the first step in what it hopes will be a fruitful long-term relationship with the vendor, Davis says.