Finance and market intelligence firms have never been more data-driven. The need for greater information for the purpose of monitoring economic conditions has been acutely highlighted during the recent COVID19 outbreaks in particular.
Quandl, a NASDAQ company, for example, has been able to examine the number of small business closures using time tracking data of hourly workers , making use of “alternative data” that was not traditionally available in real time to many analysts. Tableau Software, a Salesforce company, has highlighted extensive visualizations by Salesforce Research , displaying data from surveys that express consumer, business, and industry sentiment regarding COVID19 forecasts.
Yet replicating what Quandl, Salesforce, and others have done isn’t simple, despite the abundance of information available to the public. The major challenge is that getting datasets to a point where they can be used to derive insights isn’t always easy. According to data presentation firm Talend, “there are billions of dollars moving across global markets daily, and analysts are responsible for monitoring this data with precision, security, and speed to establish predictions, uncover patterns and create predictive strategies. The value of this data is heavily reliant on how it is gathered, processed, stored and interpreted.”
An incredible amount of formally reported financial and market data is trapped inside unstructured, text covered, securities-commission-regulated reports, earnings transcripts and trade statistics. Major arbitrage firms, laser-focused on extracting information and market signals just split seconds ahead of competitors to make high value transactions, are increasingly adopting new technologies to find value. Moreover, data that is required immediately during COVID19, such as pending layoff reports, stimulus packages, and new product launches or pivots are often contained in news reports – not official filings that may not be as forward looking.
Active fund managers, institutional investors, market intelligence companies and government regulators have been pouring over news to catch wind of key business signals like mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, bankruptcies, and FDA approvals and more, in addition to changes in fundamental financial information.
Sachi Komarasamy and his team at Intellizence recognized how much intensive effort was being put forth by market intelligence analysts, sales and marketing professionals, innovation and strategy teams and regulators to manually comb over everything they had in the way of market signals. With the explosion of news, they knew that there had to be a more automated way to extract relevant signals and insights out of the noise. His team developed an award-winning AI-powered platform that helps enterprises monitor sales and risk signals in their target companies (e.g. customers, competitors, suppliers), business events, industry trends and regulatory changes.
The Intellizence system initially focused on discovering and delivering hundreds of signals (e.g. executive changes, M&A, fundraising, downsizing, recalls, etc.) from comprehensive unstructured data sources, such as news articles, press releases and filings. The platform delivered these signals in structured formats through various delivery channels (email alerts, CRM, Slack, API, iframe, etc.,) to power a variety of media, like daily newsletters, cognitive search, scoring, conversational AI and trends and insights. Executives and analysts in global financial services firms, fast-growing technology platforms and innovation agencies like Communitech rely on Intellizence for various applications like sales, market, competition, and risk intelligence. For their innovative product, the company won a 2016 TiE50 award, received a Thomson Reuters Dataset grant from CDMN and was a recipient of three AI research funds selected through highly competitive processes, including the IBM Innovation Incubator’s Project Support Program managed by Communitech, IBM and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE).
Recently, the company has launched a series of business event datasets available through a REST API – focused on mergers & acquisitions , startup/VC funding and layoffs . Interesting datasets are available now focused on COVID-19 companies that are receiving Health Canada/FDA approvals, recalls of COVID-19 focused diagnostic kits, therapeutics, vaccines and medical devices. Very soon, Intellizence is planning to launch more unique datasets around companies filing bankruptcies, data breaches and security attacks. The datasets are also published in Programmable Web and other data exchanges like AWS Data Exchange upon release. Check out the Intellizence API documentation here.
