The story
In 1968, Capital International published indices covering the global stock market for non-U.S. markets. In 1986, Morgan Stanley licensed the rights to the indices from Capital International and branded the indices as the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) indices. By the 1980s, the MSCI indices were the primary benchmark indices outside of the U.S. before being joined by FTSE, Citibank, and Standard & Poor's. After Dow Jones started float weighting its index funds, MSCI followed. In 2004, MSCI acquired Barra, Inc., to form MSCI Barra. In mid-2007, parent company Morgan Stanley decided to divest MSCI. This was followed by an initial public offering of a minority of stock in November 2007. The divestment was completed in 2009. The company is headquartered in New York City.
Some companies in MSCI's peer group include Glass Lewis, Factset, Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, and S&P.
Acquisitions
In 2010, MSCI acquired RiskMetrics Group, Inc. and Measurisk.
In 2012, MSCI acquired Investment Property Databank.
In 2013, MSCI acquired Investor Force from ICG Group (formerly Internet Capital Group).
In August 2014, MSCI acquired GMI Ratings.
In October 2019, MSCI acquired Carbon Delta, a Zurich-based climate change analytics company.
In September 2021, MSCI acquired Real Capital Analytics.
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In August 2023, MSCI completed the acquisition of New Jersey–based private assets data provider, Burgiss Group for $697 million.
Collaborations
In October 2021, MSCI and Cboe Global Markets signed a licensing agreement that would see MSCI grow its options product suite and allow them to work on other projects as well.
In April 2022, MSCI entered into a collaboration with MarketAxess to incorporate MSCI's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data and MarketAxess' pricing and liquidity indicators into fixed income indices in order to construct portfolios based on this data.
From Wikipedia’s article on MSCI, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7