Msci — Business Overview
What does MSCI do?
MSCI provides data, analytics, and indexes that help institutional investors understand and manage their portfolios. Think of MSCI as a company that builds the measuring sticks and analytical tools that the world's largest investors use to make decisions. If a fund manager wants to know how their portfolio compares to global equity markets, or how exposed they are to climate risk, MSCI likely has a product for that. As of December 31, 2025, MSCI served approximately 6,800 clients across more than 100 countries, with 6,268 employees worldwide.
MSCI operates across four business segments, which together cover indexes, risk analytics, sustainability data, and private market tools:
| Segment | What It Does | Share of 2025 Revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Index | Creates and licenses market indexes (equity, fixed income, factor, sustainability, climate, custom) used as benchmarks and for building ETFs and other index-linked products | 57.0% |
| Analytics | Provides risk management, portfolio construction, and performance attribution tools across asset classes | 22.8% |
| Sustainability and Climate | Offers ESG ratings (a measure of how companies manage environmental, social, and governance risks), climate data, and regulatory reporting tools | 11.3% |
| All Other – Private Assets | Data and analytics for private equity, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure investments | 8.9% |
How does MSCI make money?
The majority of MSCI's revenue comes from recurring subscriptions, where clients pay fixed annual fees to access MSCI's data, tools, and indexes. This model creates predictable, sticky revenue because clients embed MSCI products deeply into their daily investment workflows — switching costs are high.
A meaningful slice of revenue, particularly within the Index segment, comes from asset-based fees. When an asset manager runs an ETF that tracks an MSCI index — like the hugely popular MSCI Emerging Markets Index — they pay MSCI a fee based on the assets under management (AUM) in that fund. These fees fluctuate with market levels and fund flows. Within the Index segment alone, asset-based fees accounted for 43.1% of segment revenue in 2025. MSCI's single largest client, BlackRock, generated 10.8% of total company revenue, with 96.5% of that coming from fees tied to BlackRock's ETFs and other products benchmarked to MSCI indexes.
What market does MSCI operate in?
MSCI sits at the center of the global financial data and index industry, which serves the multi-trillion-dollar asset management ecosystem. The industry's growth is closely tied to the continued expansion of indexed investing — particularly ETFs — and growing demand for tools to manage complex, multi-asset portfolios.
Several long-term trends are actively working in MSCI's favor. The growth of passive and rules-based investing (index funds and ETFs) keeps expanding the pool of assets that need MSCI indexes as benchmarks. At the same time, regulatory pressure and investor demand are pushing institutions to integrate sustainability and climate risk data into their processes, expanding MSCI's addressable market. Increasing allocation to private assets (private equity, private credit, infrastructure) is creating demand for the kind of standardized data and benchmarks that MSCI's private assets segment provides.
One headwind to watch is the regulatory environment around ESG ratings. The European Union adopted rules in November 2024 requiring ESG rating providers to be authorized with ESMA (the EU's securities regulator) by July 2026. MSCI is directly in scope and will need to comply. Separately, MSCI is exiting the Indian ESG ratings market after a strategic review.
Who are MSCI's main competitors?
The index business is dominated by a small number of scaled players, making it a fairly concentrated market at the top. MSCI's main index competitors include:
- S&P Dow Jones Indices (a joint venture of S&P Global and CME Group) — home of the S&P 500
- FTSE Russell (subsidiary of London Stock Exchange Group) — widely used in UK and global markets
- Nasdaq, Bloomberg, and Solactive — competitors in specific index categories
In analytics and sustainability, the competitive landscape is broader. Analytics competitors include Axioma (part of SimCorp), BlackRock Solutions, Bloomberg, and FactSet. Sustainability and climate competitors include Sustainalytics (owned by Morningstar), Institutional Shareholder Services (majority-owned by Deutsche Börse), S&P Global, and Bloomberg.
MSCI's stated competitive advantages center on three things: the depth and proprietary nature of its research and data (built over decades), strong relationships with the world's largest investment institutions, and flexible technology delivery (APIs, cloud platforms, data feeds) that allows clients to embed MSCI content into their own systems. The fact that MSCI's indexes underpin trillions of dollars in ETFs and other indexed products creates a powerful network effect — the more products that track an MSCI index, the more essential that index becomes.
Where does MSCI operate?
MSCI is a global business with clients in more than 100 countries, though its employee base tells an interesting geographic story. Of its 6,268 employees as of December 31, 2025: 51% are in the Asia Pacific region, 24% in Europe, Middle East and Africa, 16% in the U.S. and Canada, and 9% in Mexico and Brazil. This means the majority of MSCI's workforce is outside its New York headquarters, reflecting a deliberate strategy to locate talent in lower-cost markets.
MSCI's products are sold globally, but regulatory obligations vary by region. MSCI operates as a licensed benchmark administrator in both the UK (authorized by the FCA) and the EU (authorized by BaFin and ESMA), reflecting the importance of European institutional investors as clients. China is also a registered market where MSCI supplies financial information services, registered with the Cyberspace Administration of China. No single non-U.S. country is cited as generating a dominant share of revenue, but Europe and Asia Pacific collectively represent a large portion of MSCI's client base given the global nature of institutional investing.