Morningstar, Inc. (Morningstar) is a global provider of independent investment insights.
The company’s core competencies are data, research, design, and technology, and it employs each of these to create products built on the depth and breadth of its data that are designed to clearly convey complex investment information. The company offers a variety of products and solutions that serve a wide range of market participants, including individual and institutional investors in public and private c...
Morningstar, Inc. (Morningstar) is a global provider of independent investment insights.
The company’s core competencies are data, research, design, and technology, and it employs each of these to create products built on the depth and breadth of its data that are designed to clearly convey complex investment information. The company offers a variety of products and solutions that serve a wide range of market participants, including individual and institutional investors in public and private capital markets; financial advisors and wealth managers; alliances and redistributors; asset managers; retirement plan providers, advisors, and sponsors; and issuers of fixed-income securities. The company also leverages its investing expertise to manage assets for clients who value the guidance of professional portfolio management teams.
The company structures its business to help investors in three key areas. First, the company’s products support individuals, financial advisors, and wealth managers, asset managers, and institutions who make their own investment decisions. Through the company’s Morningstar Data and Analytics and PitchBook segments, as well as Morningstar Sustainalytics products, its customers have access to a wide selection of investment data, fundamental equity research, manager research, private capital markets research, environmental, social, and governance ratings and data, fund ratings, and indexes directly on its proprietary desktop or web-based software platforms, or through direct data feeds, direct shares, streaming capabilities, and application programming interfaces (APIs).
Second, through the company’s Morningstar Wealth and Morningstar Retirement segments, it provides investment management services and advisor tools and platforms. Morningstar Wealth's managed portfolio offerings help advisors deliver investor-friendly products based on its valuation-driven, fundamentals-based approach to investing, applying Morningstar's expertise in asset allocation, investment selection, and portfolio construction. Through Morningstar Retirement, the company helps retirement plan sponsors and retirement specialist advisors build high-quality savings programs for employees. In addition, it provides investable solutions to build portfolios based on unique Morningstar intellectual property through the company’s Morningstar Indexes products. Investors also use its indexes as benchmarks, to create investable products based on its proprietary research, or to construct portfolios using customized indexes.
Finally, through the company’s Morningstar Credit segment, it provides investors with credit ratings, research, data, and credit analytics solutions that contribute to the transparency of international and domestic credit markets. Morningstar DBRS is the fourth largest credit rating agency in the world, offering a wide range of credit rating services and products for financial institutions, corporate and sovereign entities, and structured finance products and instruments.
Data, Research, and Ratings
Morningstar’s trusted data, research, and ratings underpin everything the company does across its business. The company’s data covers a wide range of investment offerings, including managed investment products, publicly listed companies, private companies, fixed-income securities, private credit, and bank loans.
The company focuses its data, research, and ratings efforts on several areas:
Manager Research (including Mutual Funds, Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), Separately-Managed Accounts, and Other Vehicles)
The company provides independent analyst research on managed investment strategies. In 2023, the company united its two forward-looking managed investment ratings—the Morningstar Analyst Rating and the Morningstar Quantitative Ratings for funds—into a single rating: the Morningstar Medalist Rating. The Morningstar Medalist Rating blends human and machine-driven research and analysis that have long underpinned the company’s qualitative and quantitative ratings approaches, simplifying strategy search, selection, and workflow monitoring. The Medalist Rating covers more than 64,000 distinct mutual funds, ETFs, separately managed accounts, and model portfolios, and more than 450,000 share classes worldwide. It augments other quantitative ratings and analytics, such as the Morningstar Rating for funds (the ‘star rating’), which ranks managed investment strategies, such as mutual funds based on their past risk-adjusted performance versus their Morningstar category peers. The company also publishes research and ratings on state-sponsored college-savings plans, target-date funds, and health-savings accounts.
In addition, the Morningstar Style Box visually depicts a strategy’s underlying investment style, making it easier to compare investments and build portfolios. The star rating and style box have become important tools that millions of investors and advisors use to make investment decisions.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had more than 130 manager research analysts globally, including teams in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Public Company and Private Market Research
As part of the company’s research efforts on individual stocks, it popularized the concepts of economic moat, a measure of competitive advantage originally developed by Warren Buffett, and margin of safety, which reflects the size of the discount in a stock's price relative to its estimated value. The Morningstar Rating for stocks is based on the stock's current price relative to its analyst-generated fair value estimates, as well as the company's level of business risk and economic moat. The company’s analysts cover approximately 1,600 companies using a consistent, proprietary methodology that focuses on fundamental analysis, competitive advantage assessment, and intrinsic value estimation. Morningstar’s data and research on publicly traded companies is used extensively in its products and solutions, such as institutional equity research, Morningstar Indexes, such as the Morningstar Wide Moat Focus Index, its Global Market Barometer, and as a basis for equity portfolio strategies used in Morningstar Managed Portfolios.
PitchBook’s Institutional Research Group is a provider of investment strategy, fund performance, and industry research. The group leverages PitchBook’s proprietary data, such as valuations, deal multiples, and fund returns, to deliver analysis that allows clients to quickly gauge trends, price transactions, assess risks, and identify notable company sets in the private capital markets. As of December 31, 2024, the team provided coverage of the private equity, venture capital, real assets, leveraged loan, high-yield bond, and private credit asset classes. PitchBook also provides full-time analyst coverage of emerging technology industries, delivering comprehensive assessments of disruptive sectors to help clients better segment and size markets, understand company and investor landscapes, evaluate opportunities, and develop conviction around the growth trajectories of emerging industries.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 130 public equity researchers and more than 30 private markets researchers globally, making it one of the largest providers of independent equity research. In addition to the company’s analyst-driven coverage, it provides quantitative ratings and reports for approximately 40,000 publicly traded companies across Morningstar's solutions and covers approximately 5.2 million privately-held companies through the PitchBook platform.
Credit Ratings
Morningstar DBRS provides global credit ratings as the world’s fourth-largest credit rating agency. The company rates more than 4,000 issuers and 60,000 securities worldwide, providing independent credit ratings for financial institutions, corporate and sovereign entities, and structured finance products and instruments. The company’s intention is to bring more clarity, diversity, and responsiveness to the ratings process. The company’s approach and size provide the agility to respond to customers’ needs with the necessary expertise and resources.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had more than 500 credit rating analysts and analytical support staff based in the United States (U.S.), Canada, Europe, and India.
ESG Risk Ratings
Morningstar Sustainalytics’ ESG Risk Ratings look to provide investors with tools to assess financially material environmental, social, and governance risks that could affect the long-term performance of their investments at the security, fund, and portfolio levels. The ratings introduce a single measurement unit to assess these risks across 22 different material issues (MEIs). Morningstar Sustainalytics’ ESG Risk Ratings are designed to provide insight into a company’s absolute ESG risk that is comparable across peers and sub-industries while allowing for aggregation at the portfolio level.
As of December 31, 2024, Morningstar Sustainalytics rated more than 16,000 companies globally and employed more than 190 research analysts based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia.
Segments and Products
The company operates its business through five reportable segments: Morningstar Data and Analytics, PitchBook, Morningstar Wealth, Morningstar Credit, and Morningstar Retirement.
Morningstar Data and Analytics
Morningstar Data and Analytics provides investors comprehensive data, research, and insights, and investment analysis to empower investment decision-making. Morningstar Data and Analytics includes Morningstar Data, Morningstar Direct, Morningstar Advisor Workstation, Profiles, and Morningstar Direct Reporting, Direct Web Services, and Morningstar Research Distribution. These products are designed to provide seamless access to Morningstar's managed investment, public equities, and fixed-income data, with a focus on making the work of portfolio managers, product developers, marketers, advisors, and analysts more efficient and effective.
In 2024, the company sold its Commodity and Energy Data business, which was included in the Morningstar Data and Analytics segment.
Morningstar Data's licensed data gives asset managers, redistributors, and wealth managers independent, comprehensive, and timely data and research they can use to empower investor success. The company’s offering spans managed investments (including mutual funds, ETFs, separate accounts, collective investment trusts, and model portfolios), equities, and fixed-income securities and is available globally. Morningstar Data’s largest products include managed investment data, Morningstar Essentials, exchange market data, and equity data.
The company is well-known for enriching raw data on managed investments with research-driven intellectual property to offer investors the ability to compare investments across asset classes and to better assess investments with easy-to-understand yet insightful and actionable insights. The company distributes its proprietary statistics, including the Morningstar Category, Morningstar Style Box, and Morningstar Rating, through licensed data feeds. The company also offers a wide range of other data sets, 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.
Clients license Morningstar Data to build transparent products and services that investors, from those just starting out to sophisticated and high-net-worth individuals, can understand and use to reach their investing goals.
Morningstar Data is used to serve retail investors and their intermediaries, supporting a variety of investor communications, including websites, print publications, and marketing fact sheets, as well as for internal research and product development. Morningstar also serves redistributors who ultimately serve the asset and wealth client management segments. These clients use the company’s data as inputs to their risk models or analytics alongside their own data to serve clients with products ranging from advisor tools to public financial sites. Smaller redistributor clients use vendor data for personal wealth apps or advisor-facing tools.
Demand for Morningstar Data has increased as clients build digital solutions, prepare for regulatory requirements, and incorporate automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other forms of data analytics into their workflows. The company is committed to covering its clients’ whole portfolios and offering the data they need to make informed investment decisions.
The company’s data feeds enable its clients to discover the data that they need, and to schedule delivery in S3, FTP, CSV, XML, JSON, Text, and TSV output formats. The company provides access to Morningstar Data utilizing an API format to download and process large data files. The Morningstar Data team applies emerging methods in AI to regression, classification, deep learning, natural language processing, and optical character recognition to extract data from structured and unstructured content. The Morningstar 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 Morningstar Data team's machine learning models. This approach enables Morningstar to produce data faster without compromising the quality of data that the company’s clients use in making sound investment decisions.
In 2024, Morningstar Data’s largest markets were North America and Europe.
The company’s main global competitors for mutual fund data include FE fundinfo and LSEG (Refinitiv).
For market and equity data, the company primarily competes with Bloomberg, FactSet, ICE Data Services, LSEG (Refinitiv), and S&P Global.
Morningstar Direct is an investment analysis and reporting application that delivers data and analytics across asset classes and streamlines report creation and distribution to client-facing groups and internal teams. Built on Morningstar's global database of registered and non-registered securities and data from third-party providers, the application helps asset managers with market research, product positioning, competitive analysis, and distribution strategies. Wealth managers use the tool to assist with manager research, fund selection, and the construction, monitoring, and distribution of model portfolios.
In 2024, Morningstar Direct saw significant enhancements, with an emphasis on creating an improved and streamlined user experience. Continuing the momentum from 2023, the company refined Morningstar Direct’s user interface and expanded the Direct Lens experience. Direct Lens, designed to integrate and unify portfolio-creation capabilities, now offers expanded features, such as portfolio creation and analysis, list building, investment search capabilities, asset flows, and the integration of an AI-powered research assistant to more efficiently help users to make the most of Direct Lens’ features. The company enhanced Morningstar Direct’s equity data by incorporating consensus estimates and more comprehensive fundamental equity data. This development broadens the application of Morningstar Direct by showing users detailed equity insights alongside traditional use cases.
Morningstar Direct remains a leading solution for analyzing and comparing investment data and showing the results of that research with robust reporting and data distribution capabilities. Expanded datasets and workflow improvements position Morningstar Direct as a multi-asset portfolio analytics application that combines proprietary research, data, and analytics, with data coverage that now extends to private investments, public investments outside of mutual funds, and individual securities. Morningstar Direct further evolved to meet the needs of investors in 2024 by introducing new datapoints, calculations, and portfolio-level insights, and enhancing coverage across fixed income, ETFs, model portfolios, and alternatives. Investors are adopting increasingly complex and dynamic investment strategies, and Morningstar Direct seeks to empower users with the tools, insights, and data they need to thrive in a rapidly changing industry.
Morningstar Direct is a desktop application that is installed locally on users’ computers. The Morningstar Direct desktop application connects over the internet to databases and application servers hosted primarily in Morningstar data centers, with some use of cloud (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure. A large portion of Morningstar Direct’s features and functionality are delivered using modern web components and frameworks delivered within the legacy application.
Pricing for Morningstar Direct is based on the number of licenses purchased, and the company’s simplified licensing model eliminates charges for add-on features to maximize the customer experience and allow users to extract more value.
Morningstar Direct's primary markets are North America and Europe.
Morningstar Direct's primary competitors are Bloomberg, eVestment Alliance, FactSet Research System’s Cognity and SPAR, LSEG's (Refinitiv) Eikon, Strategic Insight’s Simfund, and Zephyr.
Morningstar Advisor Workstation is a connected suite of tools spanning proposal creation, investment research, investment planning, and more designed to help the company’s clients provide great advice to their clients. It is powered by Morningstar’s data, research, investor profiling tools, and robust portfolio analytics.
The software is typically sold through an enterprise contract and is primarily for retail advisors because of its strong ties and integration with home-office applications and processes and a library of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) reviewed reports that meet compliance needs. It allows advisors to build and maintain a client portfolio database that can be fully connected with the home-office firm's back-office technology and resources. This helps advisors present and illustrate their portfolio investment strategies, show the value of their advice, and meet existing and emerging regulatory requirements, all at scale.
In 2024, the company continued to enhance Morningstar Advisor Workstation. It launched and won its first clients for a new proprietary model offering that allows its clients who are building model portfolios in Morningstar Direct to directly publish them to their advisors in Advisor Workstation. As firm models grow in popularity due to their ability to allow more-scalable investment plan personalization and align to the U.S. regulations, the company expects more clients to seek out this offering. Additionally, it launched the insights dashboard in Enterprise Analytics, an add-on for Advisor Workstation that gives firms visibility into firmwide advisor activity. The new insights dashboard provides home offices with analytics to assess the quality, scope, and volume of advice with month-over-month analysis of proposal value, frequently proposed assets and asset classes, risk scores, and more. The company also made several upgrades to Mo, Morningstar’s AI assistant in Advisor Workstation, including the ability to create filtered investment lists from natural language prompts and generate personalized client talking points.
In 2024, due to low adoption, the company reassessed its strategy for AppHub, a two-sided digital marketplace initially introduced into Advisor Workstation in 2022 where clients could access additional third-party applications. It transitioned to a strategic partnership approach with a focus on building relationships and integrations with firms aligned to more common advisor workflows.
Morningstar Advisor Workstation is primarily sold through an enterprise contract, and it can license single seats for individual advisors as well. It is offered in the U.S. and Canada, spanning over 225 firms and 170,000 advisors.
In January 2025, the company expanded its advisor offering with the launch of Morningstar Direct Advisory Suite. Morningstar Direct Advisory Suite is a connected suite of capabilities spanning proposal creation, investment research, and investment planning with an updated, modern interface built for the advisor workflow.
Competitors for Morningstar Advisor Workstation include CapIntel, Orion, Riskalyze, and YCharts.
PitchBook
PitchBook provides investors with access to a broad collection of data and research covering the private capital markets, including venture capital, private equity, private credit, and bank loans, and merger and acquisition (M&A) activities, as well as Morningstar’s data and research on public equities, all delivered through the PitchBook platform. In addition, PitchBook makes data available in flexible à la carte solutions via formats, such as APIs and feeds, as part of its direct data product, which is included in the company’s reporting of the PitchBook product area. The PitchBook segment also includes its Morningstar Institutional Equity Research product.
The PitchBook platform is an all-in-one web-hosted solution for investment and research professionals, including venture capital and private equity firms, corporate development teams, investment banks, limited partners, lenders, law firms, accounting firms, and asset managers. Clients rely on PitchBook for a central, easy-to-use platform that provides access to what is the broadest and most in-depth collection of data and research covering the private capital markets, as well as Morningstar's data and research on public equities. To accommodate the company’s clients' diverse needs, the platform offers data and analytical tools, including company profiles for both private and public companies, advanced search functionality, and other intellectual property (IP) tools that help to inform discovery and research and optimize workflow by surfacing relevant information and insights. The company’s clients source deals, conduct due diligence, raise capital, build buyer lists, benchmark funds, and network with the PitchBook platform. Licensed PitchBook platform users also have access to a mobile application, customer relationship management (CRM) integrations, and Excel and PowerPoint plug-ins.
In 2024, PitchBook remained focused on expanding its delivery of actionable data and insights across private and public markets while empowering better investment decisions and outcomes through comprehensive research, proprietary tools, and timely intelligence. Key enhancements included the expansion of the company’s private credit data and capabilities on the PitchBook platform following the completion of the Leveraged Commentary & Data (LCD) acquisition, the addition of third-party aftermarket research to the platform, enhancements to the Research Center, and ongoing investment in AI and machine learning tools and capabilities.
PitchBook also launched PitchBook Credit, a centralized resource on the PitchBook platform that combines PitchBook’s proprietary data with LCD’s news, research, and tools to streamline credit workflows. PitchBook Credit includes a credit dashboard that enables users to easily navigate to PitchBook’s core credit offering, consisting of breaking credit news, institutional research, a complete database of debt and lenders data, screeners, loan and bond forward calendars, and details on the Morningstar LSTA Leveraged Loans Index family. PitchBook also integrated LCD’s BDC (business development company) portfolio holdings data and CLO (collateralized loan obligation) data into PitchBook Credit, which, combined with its existing coverage, delivers transparency into historically opaque debt deals and fund disclosures.
In 2024, PitchBook also introduced access to aftermarket research from an initial list of nine third-party equity research providers on the PitchBook platform. These third-party insights complement the Morningstar Institutional Equity Research also available on the platform, which offers fundamental valuations, ratings, and analysis on over 1,600 public companies worldwide, and comprehensive sector and thematic research. Along with the integration of third-party research, PitchBook unveiled significant enhancements to its Research Center, including advanced search and filtering capabilities, and improved reader view tools, streamlining market analysis and due diligence workflows. These capabilities included the release of AI Insights Transcripts, which enables users to extract and summarize key insights from earnings calls, including analyst Q&A sessions.
Pricing for the PitchBook platform is based on the number of seats, with standard base license fees per user and customized prices for large enterprises, boutiques, and startup firms.
In 2024, PitchBook’s largest markets were North America and Europe.
PitchBook's main competitors are CB Insights, Preqin (BlackRock), and S&P Global Market Intelligence.
PitchBook had 125,491 licensed users worldwide as of December 31, 2024.
Morningstar Credit
Morningstar Credit provides investors with credit ratings, research, data, and credit analytics solutions that contribute to the transparency of international and domestic credit markets. Morningstar Credit includes Morningstar DBRS and Morningstar Credit data and credit analytics.
Morningstar DBRS is the fourth largest credit rating agency in the world, offering a wide range of credit rating services and products. Morningstar DBRS 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 CLOs. 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 Morningstar DBRS’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. Morningstar DBRS’s credit rating methodologies are publicly available and support the objectivity and integrity of the credit rating process. Morningstar DBRS also offers a micro-website dedicated to environmental, social, and governance factors deemed relevant to credit ratings analysis.
In addition to ratings and research opinions, Morningstar DBRS also offers data products derived from its ratings activities and analytical tools. These include ratings data feeds that can be integrated into companies’ internal databases, web-based research, and analytical tools.
In 2024, Morningstar DBRS’s largest markets by revenue were the U.S., followed by Canada and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
Morningstar DBRS competes with several other firms, including Fitch Ratings, Kroll Bond Ratings, Moody’s Ratings, and S&P Global Ratings.
Morningstar Wealth
Morningstar Wealth’s intention is to empower both advisors and investors to succeed. Bringing together Investment Management, including the company’s model portfolios and the International Wealth Platform, data aggregation and enrichment capabilities via ByAllAccounts, and its individual investor platform, Morningstar.com, the company offers a comprehensive suite of solutions globally. These products are designed to streamline workflows and help advisors deliver scalable, customized advice, ultimately supporting clients in achieving their long-term financial goals.
In February 2025, the company announced that it plans to retire Morningstar Office, the company’s practice and portfolio management software for registered investment advisors (RIAs). Clients will have the option of transitioning to SS&C’s BlackDiamond Wealth Platform, which will be integrated with the newly launched Morningstar Direct Advisory Suite, a product in the Morningstar Data and Analytics segment.
Investment Management’s flagship offering is Morningstar Model Portfolios (also referred to as Morningstar Managed Portfolios), an advisor service consisting of model portfolios designed for fee-based independent financial advisors. The company’s core markets are the U.S., the U.K., South Africa, and Australia. The company targets like-minded advisors who hire it to manage a portion of their client’s assets in alignment with its principles of putting investors first, keeping costs low, and investing for the long term. The company builds its multi-asset strategies using mutual funds, ETFs, and individual securities, and tailors them to meet specific investment time horizons, risk levels, and projected outcomes.
Morningstar Model Portfolios are available through two core distribution channels: the Morningstar International Wealth Platform, which offers fee-based discretionary asset management services, and strategist models on third-party managed account platforms. The company offers the International Wealth Platform in the U.K. and select international markets. The company serves as a fund and model provider in Australia, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. In 2024, the company sold customer assets from the U.S. Morningstar Wealth Turnkey Asset Management Platform (TAMP) to AssetMark and announced that it would be retiring its US TAMP in 2025 to concentrate on the distribution of its investment products on third-party platforms in that market. AssetMark now offers a selection of Morningstar Model Portfolios on its platform.
The International Wealth Platform offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to enhance the client experience and streamline advisor operations. The platform emphasizes efficiency with paperless applications and acceptance of digital signatures via DocuSign and AdobeSign, eliminating the need for physical paperwork. Its portfolio management capabilities accommodate both model portfolios (separately managed accounts) and bespoke portfolios (individually managed accounts), allowing multiple portfolios per client across different tax wrappers. The customizable adviser portal enables advisors to tailor their interface, including branding with their own logo and color scheme, while providing clients with view-only access to essential portfolio information and documents. Leveraging machine learning and AI, the platform offers insights to help advisors anticipate client needs, such as potential advisor switches or significant life events, facilitating timely and personalized engagement.
In addition to Morningstar Model Portfolios and the International Wealth Platform, the company also offers institutional asset-management (e.g., acting as a subadvisor) and asset-allocation services for asset managers, broker/dealers, and insurance providers. The company offers these services through a variety of registered entities in Australia, Canada, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), France, Japan, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S.
The company charges asset-based program fees for Morningstar Model Portfolios, which are typically based on the distribution channel and the products contained within the portfolios. The company bases pricing for institutional asset-management and asset-allocation services on the scope of work, the company’s degree of investment discretion, and the level of service required. For most of the company’s contracts, it receives asset-based fees.
The company’s primary model portfolio offering competitors are BlackRock, Fidelity, and Clark Capital in the U.S. The company faces competition from Brooks Macdonald, LGT Wealth Management, and Tatton in EMEA, and Elston, Lonsec, and Russell in Australia. The company’s primary competitors for the Morningstar International Wealth Platform are abrdn, Aviva, Nucleus, and Parmenion.
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 for Morningstar Investor/Morningstar Premium, and internet advertising sales. Morningstar Investor is the successor to Morningstar Premium in the U.S. and Australia.
The company’s Morningstar Investor offering is focused on providing transparency into investment choices to enable investors to make informed decisions about their portfolios. 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. The company offers Investor and Premium memberships in Australia, Canada, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.
The company’s advertising business is entirely sold direct to clients, unlike many media websites where advertising is sold via programmatic platforms. This approach allows the company to build meaningful relationships with its advertisers, maintain pricing, and helps protect the integrity of its brand. The result is that Morningstar is seen as a trusted partner and critical platform for the world's largest asset managers and financial companies for reaching advisors and investors globally.
In 2024, the company redesigned Morningstar.com and unified it with Morningstar Investor to create a better experience for the millions of individual investors, advisors, and professionals visiting the company’s site monthly. The redesign places more emphasis on its research, data, and editorial. The company simplified the site navigation, making it easier to navigate its new markets area, sector pages, investing ideas, and articles. The company also bolstered its Investor subscription with new data, functionality, and additional asset allocation x-ray details within its portfolio tool; expanded screening capabilities; and added a new notifications feed to provide investors with timely updates about changes that have occurred for securities in their portfolios and watchlists.
The company charges a monthly or annual subscription fee for Morningstar Investor and Morningstar Premium.
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 Seeking Alpha, The Motley Fool, and Zacks Investment Research, also compete with the company for paid membership. In addition, free or ‘freemium’ websites, such as Dow Jones/Marketwatch and Yahoo Finance, are also competitors for some customers. Kiplinger, TheStreet.com, and The Wall Street Journal all compete for the advertising dollars of entities wishing to reach an engaged audience of investors.
As of December 31, 2024, Morningstar.com had 97,311 paid Morningstar Investor members in the U.S. plus an additional approximately 12,000 Premium and Morningstar Investor members across other global markets.
Morningstar Retirement
Morningstar Retirement offers products designed to help individuals reach their retirement goals. Its offerings include managed retirement accounts (MRA), fiduciary services, Morningstar Lifetime Allocation funds, and custom models.
Morningstar Retirement offers three distinct types of managed accounts—the company’s branded version (Retirement Manager), a white-labeled version, and an advisor managed accounts service geared toward advisors. These products were developed to address different distribution channels within the market. In all three instances, the company’s objective is to help retirement plan participants define, track, and achieve their retirement goals. As part of this service, the company (or a third party, in the case of some of its advisor managed accounts and its white-labeled versions) delivers personalized recommendations for a target retirement income goal, a recommended contribution rate to help achieve that goal, a portfolio mix based on its Total Wealth methodology, and specific investment recommendations. The company then manages the participant’s investment portfolio, assuming full discretionary control. Within the advisor managed accounts service, the company enables advisor firms to specify and assume fiduciary responsibility for the underlying portfolios that are used within MRA, and the user experience is co-branded. The company does not hold assets in custody for the MRA it provides. The company’s white-labeled version relies on its technology and methodologies, with the client providing the user experience and assuming responsibility for the allocation of available investment options. All three versions can be used in defined-contribution (DC) retirement plans, as well as with individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and health savings accounts (HSAs).
In the company’s fiduciary services offering, it helps plan sponsors build out and manage an appropriate investment lineup for their participants while helping to mitigate their fiduciary risk. Advisors use the service to reduce the time and resources needed to continually oversee and monitor the investments within each client’s retirement plan lineup. Within the broker-dealer space, some advisors aren’t allowed by their home offices to sell retirement plans without using a third-party fiduciary service provider or an internal solution. The company’s fiduciary service offering is also integrated into Pooled Employer Plans in order to deliver a single plan at scale to multiple employers. The company also offers a practice-managed platform called Plan Advantage that helps advisors manage their retirement book of business using its underlying fiduciary services compliance and investment infrastructure.
With the company’s custom models, it offers two different services. The company works with retirement plan recordkeepers to design scalable solutions for their investment lineups, including target maturity models and risk-based models. The company 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. The company also serves as a non-discretionary subadvisor and index provider for the Morningstar Lifetime Allocation Funds, a series of target-date collective investment trusts (CITs) offered by Benefit Trust to retirement plan sponsors.
In 2024, the company added around 339 plans and 15,378 participants across the 19 RIAs and one asset manager on its advisor managed accounts network.
For both managed accounts and fiduciary services, the company is facing increasing competition from incumbents, as well as some newcomers. On the managed accounts front, the company’s most significant competitor in the large plan space is Edelman Financial Engines. In the small end of the market, the company faces competition from firms, such as Smart Retirement and iJoin. One notable development in the managed accounts space has been the emergence of services that enable advisors to manage a client’s retirement accounts using screen-scraping technology. Although not a direct competitor to the company’s managed accounts service, it is a development that could make it more difficult for the company to engage with individuals with large retirement balances who use an advisor to manage their wealth assets. The company’s fiduciary services product faces competition from some of the more traditional players like Mesirow and Wilshire, as well as from Leafhouse, a relative newcomer that is using a more direct-to-advisor model to distribute their services. Within the company’s custom models business, its main competitors are off-the-shelf target-date funds and consultant-built custom target-date funds. For the Lifetime Allocation Funds, the company competes with other providers of target-date funds.
Pricing for Morningstar Retirement 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.
Corporate and All Other
Corporate and All Other includes financial results from Morningstar Sustainalytics and Morningstar Indexes.
Morningstar Sustainalytics provides environmental, social, and governance data, research, and ratings to institutional investors globally, covering equity, fixed income, and sovereign asset classes. The company’s flagship ESG Risk Ratings service helps investors assess financially material risks that could affect the long-term performance of their investments. The Morningstar Sustainalytics Low-Carbon Transition Ratings (LCTR) provides a forward-looking, science-based evaluation of a company’s alignment with a net-zero pathway. Morningstar Sustainalytics also serves corporate issuers and banking institutions through its corporate solutions products and is a leading provider of Second Party Opinions (SPOs) for the sustainable fixed income market.
In addition to the company’s risk management products, Morningstar Sustainalytics provides a range of sustainable-investing solutions for investors and financial professionals. The company offers products, such as its European Union (EU) Taxonomy solution, designed to help investors respond to emerging regulatory reporting requirements surrounding sustainability. The company’s data allows values-based investors to limit their exposure to controversial areas by applying exclusions to personalize their portfolios.
In 2024, Morningstar Sustainalytics introduced significant enhancements to several key products, including its flagship ESG Risk Ratings product, upgrading the corporate governance methodology and strengthening three material risk measures. Morningstar Sustainalytics also made significant updates to its suite of regulatory products and services, including an extension of its EU Sustainable Finance Action Plan Solutions Suite. Highlights included a new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) aligned data offering which maps Sustainalytics data to emerging regulatory reporting requirements, a dedicated resource to support alignment with a new European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) fund naming guidelines solution, and the next iteration of its EU Taxonomy Solution enhancing coverage, quality, and presentation of its data.
Morningstar Sustainalytics operates on a subscription-based pricing model for its research products, which supports a recurring revenue model. The corporate solutions unit deploys a model that combines one-time revenue with subscription-based recurring licensing revenue.
In 2024, Morningstar Sustainalytics' largest markets were EMEA and North America.
Major competitors for Morningstar Sustainalytics include ISS STOXX, Moody’s, MSCI, and S&P Global. While the traditional research market in this area continues to consolidate, the company expects that the market will evolve as new entrants emerge and investors acquire data of this type from new distributors (for example, directly from stock exchanges). Large asset managers like BlackRock, State Street, UBS, and JP Morgan are also investing to build in-house capabilities and sustainable investing products. New technologies, specifically those that employ AI, are facilitating these trends by accelerating the sourcing and use of unstructured data.
Morningstar Indexes offers a broad range of market indexes that can be used as performance benchmarks and as the basis for investment products and other portfolio strategies for a wide range of retail and institutional investor clients. Combining Morningstar's intellectual property with its industry-leading index methodology, the company’s global family of indexes tracks major global regions, strategies, and asset classes, including equity, fixed income, and multi-asset, as well as private markets and sustainability.
In 2024, Morningstar Indexes continued to build on its global capabilities to further grow its client reach and service operations and completed a number of important infrastructure projects. These included the successful completion of a project to take its fixed-income index administration and processing in-house and the extension of its index calculation and back testing capabilities. In terms of product innovation, Morningstar Indexes launched the new Consensus Thematic index family, created a new investable Unicorn Index measuring the late-stage venture capital market in collaboration with PitchBook, and continued to drive record client assets into the successful Moat index franchise with Morningstar Equity Research. Morningstar Indexes also collaborated with Morningstar Sustainalytics to introduce the Morningstar Low Carbon Transition Leaders Indexes in March 2024.
The company licenses Morningstar Indexes to numerous institutions to use as the basis for ETFs, mutual funds, derivatives, and separately managed accounts. Firms license Morningstar Indexes for product creation (where the company typically receives the greater of a minimum fee or basis points tied to assets under management) and data licensing (where the company typically receives annual licensing fees). In both cases, pricing varies based on the level of distribution, the type of user, and the specific indexes licensed. In addition, Morningstar Indexes offers index calculation and administration services through its growing Index Services business.
In 2024, Morningstar Indexes’ largest markets were North America and EMEA.
Major competitors for Morningstar Indexes include Bloomberg Indices, FTSE Russell, MSCI, and S&P Dow Jones Indices (offered through S&P Global).
Strategy
The company’s strategy is to deliver insights and experiences that make it essential to investor workflow. Proprietary data sets, meaningful analytics, independent research, and effective investment strategies are at the core of the powerful digital solutions that investors across its client segments rely on. The company has a keen focus on innovation across data, research, product, and delivery so that it can effectively cater to the evolving needs and expectations of investors globally.
The company is focused on strategic priorities which are to deliver differentiated insights across asset classes to public and private market investors; leverage advances in AI to drive innovation across internal and external products and services; and drive scalability to support growth targets.
Major Customer Groups
Given the company’s strategy and core capabilities, it focuses on eight primary customer groups. Note that some of its clients may have activities that are classified in more than one of these groups, which are advisors and wealth managers (including independent financial advisors and those affiliated with RIAs, broker/dealers, or other intermediaries); alliances and redistributors; asset managers (including fund companies, insurance companies, and other companies that build and manage portfolios of securities for their clients); fixed-income security issuers and arrangers; individual investors; institutional asset owners and consultants; private market investors; and retirement (including retirement plan providers, advisors, and sponsors).
Advisors and Wealth Managers
Financial advisors are professionals who offer guidance on different aspects of personal finance, aiding individuals and businesses in making more informed investment decisions to reach their financial goals. They can work independently or within financial services firms and often possess certifications or licenses, such as Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), or Series 7, based on the services they provide and the regulatory standards in their area.
This customer group typically includes independent advisors at RIA firms, advisors affiliated with independent broker/dealers, dually registered advisors (who have the ability to offer brokerage services and investment advisory services), and advisors who are employees of a broker/dealer. These broker/dealers include wirehouses, regional broker/dealers, and banks, which together with RIA firms help comprise the wealth manager component of this customer group.
The advisor landscape is broad in both the U.S. and in other parts of the world where the company focuses. The company’s largest market is the U.S., where there were more than 321,000 financial advisors in 2023 according to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The main products the company offers for asset management firms include Model Portfolios (in Investment Management) and Morningstar Office in the company’s Morningstar Wealth segment, Morningstar Advisor Workstation in its Morningstar Data and Analytics segment, and advisor managed accounts in its Morningstar Retirement segment.
Alliances and Redistributors
Through the company’s partnership with clients in its alliances and redistributors customer group, it is focused on expanding Morningstar’s reach and partnerships with financial organizations and technology providers to distribute Morningstar's data, research, software, and investment products to a broader audience through strategic alliances and redistribution agreements.
Morningstar collaborates with global fintech firms that focus on providing solutions across multiple areas, including advisor solutions, asset management solutions, government/regulatory solutions, index providers, institutional research, media, retirement solutions, risk and compliance solutions, and TAMP/wealth technology.
These partnerships allow Morningstar to leverage its expertise in investment data and analytics to enhance the services offered by its partners. In return, the partners can offer their clients access to Morningstar’s comprehensive data, research, and analytics to power and enhance their solutions.
Asset Management Firms
Asset management firms manufacture financial products and manage and distribute investment portfolios. This customer group includes individuals involved in sales, marketing, product development, business intelligence, and distribution, as well as investment management (often referred to as the ‘buy side’), which includes portfolio management and research.
The company’s asset management offerings help companies connect with their clients because of Morningstar’s strong brand presence with both financial advisors and individual investors. The company offers a global reach and has earned investors’ trust with its independent approach, investor-centric mission, and thought leadership.
The company serves asset managers through its Morningstar Data and Analytics, Morningstar Credit, and PitchBook segments, as well as through Morningstar Indexes and Morningstar Sustainalytics. The main products the company offers for asset management firms include Morningstar Direct, Morningstar Data, and Morningstar Indexes. For the buy side, the main products include Morningstar Data, Morningstar DBRS, Morningstar Direct, Morningstar Research Distribution, and Morningstar Sustainalytics.
Fixed-Income Security Issuers, Arrangers, and Investors
The company serves fixed-income security issuers, arrangers, and investors through its Morningstar Credit segment. Morningstar DBRS typically issues credit ratings in response to requests from issuers, intermediaries, or investors. Morningstar DBRS credit ratings are requested for corporate short and long-term fixed income obligations, sovereign debt, single project financings, and structured finance programs, including securitization of receivables, such as auto loans, credit cards, residential real estate loans, and commercial real estate loans. In addition, claims-paying-ability credit ratings are issued for life, property/casualty, financial guaranty, title, and mortgage insurance companies.
Credit markets continue to evolve with companies using structured products as a key avenue for raising capital. Overall demand for structured products by institutional investors, including banks in the U.S. and Europe, remains high.
As of December 31, 2024, the company provided ratings for more than 4,000 issuers of debt.
Individual Investors
The company offers tools and content for individual investors who invest to build wealth and save for other goals, such as retirement or college tuition.
The company designs products for individual investors who are actively involved in the investing process and want to take charge of their own investment decisions. The company also reaches individuals who want to learn more about investing or want to validate the advice they receive from brokers or financial advisors.
The company serves this market through its Morningstar Wealth segment. The company offers three products for individual investors. The company’s largest based on engagement is its investing media site Morningstar.com, which offers data, editorial, and research content available for free to registered customers and visitors. The company’s second product is Morningstar Investor (Morningstar Premium outside of the U.S. and Australia), which provides access to Morningstar’s research, advanced screening tools, and portfolio management tools. The third product is a set of investment newsletters based on different investment types and investing strategies.
Institutional Asset Owners and Investment Consultants
Institutional asset owners operate in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of their beneficiaries, overseeing large pools of capital.
Investment consultants serve these organizations in an advisory capacity, aiding in the development of investment policy, conducting manager due diligence, risk management, and performance reporting.
The company offers a range of solutions to this diverse set of sponsoring entities, investors, and advisors across multiple geographies, including through the Morningstar Data and Analytics and PitchBook segments. The company’s primary products for this customer group include Morningstar Direct (in Morningstar Data and Analytics), Morningstar Indexes, Morningstar Sustainalytics, and PitchBook.
Private Market Participants
PitchBook covers the full lifecycle of venture capital, private equity, private credit, and M&A activities, including the corporates, limited partners, investment funds, lenders, and service providers involved. The company serves this customer group through its PitchBook segment, primarily through the PitchBook platform, an all-in-one research and analysis web-hosted solution that gives clients the ability to access data, inform investment strategies, and conduct research on potential investment opportunities.
As of December 31, 2024, PitchBook served over 10,600 clients, including investment and research firms, venture capital and private equity firms, investment banks, limited partners, lenders, law firms, accounting firms, and asset managers. The company also served corporate development teams at firms across industry sectors.
Retirement Market Participants
In the U.S., 401(k) and other types of DC plans are the dominant retirement savings vehicle that employers offer.
The company serves this market through its Morningstar Retirement segment. Although the company continues to look for ways to expand its retirement services into international markets, the company’s main focus is the U.S. as that market continues to demonstrate healthy growth. Additionally, many of its services are not easily adapted to international markets due to significant differences in regulatory frameworks that govern retirement saving and investing.
The company’s core retirement products (managed retirement accounts, advisor managed accounts, fiduciary services, and custom models) primarily reach individual investors through employers (plan sponsors) that offer DC plans for their employees. As of December 31, 2024, the company served 86 retirement service providers, broker dealers, asset managers, plan sponsors, and RIAs, representing about 275,000 retirement plans.
Recordkeepers, advisors, consultants, and asset managers are the main distribution channels for the company’s services. Within the advisor channel, the company provides services through the home offices of RIAs and broker dealers, with the former more focused on mid- to large-sized plans and the latter more focused on smaller retirement plans.
Revenue Types
The company leverages its proprietary data and research to sell products and services across its portfolio that generate revenue in three primary ways:
License-based: The majority of the company’s research, data, and proprietary platforms are accessed via subscription services that grant access on either a per-user or enterprise basis for a specified period of time.
Asset-based: The company charges basis points and other fees for AUMA.
Transaction-based: Represents revenue that is one time in nature and related to Morningstar Credit recurring revenue primarily derived from surveillance and research.
Largest Customer
In 2024, the company’s largest customer accounted for less than 3% of its consolidated revenue.
International Operations
The company conducts its business operations outside of the U.S. through wholly-owned subsidiaries located in each of the following 31 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, UAE, and the U.K.
Intellectual Property and Other Proprietary Rights
The company registered the Morningstar name and/or logo in approximately 50 jurisdictions, including the EU. ‘Morningstar’ and the Morningstar logo are both registered marks of Morningstar in the U.S. Some of the trademarks and service marks include Morningstar Advisor Workstation; Morningstar Plan Advantage; Morningstar Analyst Rating; Morningstar Portfolio X-Ray; Morningstar ByAllAccounts; Morningstar Rating; Morningstar Data; Morningstar Retirement Manager; Morningstar Direct; Morningstar Style Box; Morningstar Direct Web Services; Morningstar Sustainability Rating; Morningstar Indexes; Morningstar.com; Morningstar Managed Portfolios; PitchBook; Morningstar Market Barometer; DBRS; and Morningstar Office Cloud.
Sustainalytics
In 2022, via the company’s subsidiary GES International AB, Morningstar Sustainalytics notified the Swedish Finansinspektionen under Section 3 of the Act on Proxy Advisors of its business activity as a proxy advisor in Sweden. In accordance with the U.K. Proxy Advisors (Shareholders’ Rights) Regulations 2019, Sustainalytics UK Ltd. was added to the FCA’s list of Proxy Advisors in early 2022.
Morningstar Sustainalytics also provides SPOs on green and sustainability-linked bonds. The EU Green Bond Regulation, which became effective in December 2024, requires providers of SPOs in respect of green bonds (as defined by the regulation) to register with and be authorized by ESMA.
The provision of ESG ratings and data is the subject of both pending and proposed legislation and regulation. Regulation (EU) 2024/3005 on the transparency and integrity of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) rating activities (EU ESG Rating Provider Regulation) will apply beginning in July 2026, and the U.K. is proposing to extend its regulatory perimeter to bring ESG ratings within the purview of the FCA within the next four years. A program of regulatory readiness is underway aimed at adapting Morningstar Sustainalytics' business model, operational processes, and corporate organization for the purposes of the EU ESG Rating Provider Regulation.
Morningstar Indexes
Morningstar Indexes Limited has historically been registered with the FCA and authorized as a UK benchmark administrator. In connection with ongoing work to optimize the provision of Morningstar’s index services across the U.K. and EU, in the course of 2024, the administration of UK benchmarks was transferred to Morningstar Indexes GmbH, and an application was submitted to the FCA to cancel the U.K.'s authorization of Morningstar Indexes Limited. Notification to the FCA of the provision of benchmarks in the U.K. by Morningstar Indexes GmbH on the basis of UK Treasury’s equivalence determination in respect of the EU Benchmarks Regulation is pending.
Morningstar Indexes GmbH is registered with, and regulated by, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and is authorized to act as an EU benchmark administrator.
History
Morningstar, Inc. was founded in 1984. The company was incorporated in Illinois in 1984.
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