Fintech

Top 15 Metros – Fidelity Durham – Fintech Securities & Investments

In “places like … Raleigh, you see a real concentration of brain power. You have a lot of smart people living in the same place. That will drive the economy”, Steven P. Rosenthal, Northland Investment Corp. And so will tax incentives. The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill combined statistical area (CSA), with over 2 million people, is the second…

Read More

Top 15 Metros – Wild in Omaha – Fintech Securities & Investments

Today, at least in the financial world, Omaha is probably most famous for being the home of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. The company is “currently the 7th largest company in the S&P 500 Index by market capitalization and is famous for having the most expensive share price in history with a Class A share…

Read More

Breaking Down the Fintech Securities & Investments Sector

A healthy share of Fintech investment has been on the banking-side of the financial services industry, especially loan origination like LendingTree, OnDeck & SoFi, and in payments companies like Venmo, Stripe & PayPal. However, the Securities & Investments sector is also undergoing disruption. Companies like Betterment and WealthFront are targeting investment advice. And StockViews, AlphaSense, Alphametry,…

Read More

Negative Earnings Call Tone? Go Short (but not always)

Posts like “Facebook’s Q4: Conference Call Tone Matters More Than Results” in the financial press suggest that earnings call tone is important. And, invariably, the tone of the call does come up during the post call commentary and analysis. Were executives overly positive in their comments? Did they mean what they said? Did analysts’ questions…

Read More

Fintech, Savings and Loans and Springfield MA

An old piece of business advice for startups is to “get out of the office and visit customers.”  “Great,” you say, “the Fintech market is over $18b (see our previous post)!  Where do I find my prospects?”  If you have a new service for savings and loans or their customers, the data may point to…

Read More

Sizing the Fintech addressable market

Fintech, or Financial Technology, has been around for some time.  Lately, interest has been gaining steam, particularly among venture capitalists.  However, fifteen years ago, this was the abbreviation used when banking discussed its plans for IT spending, mostly back office infrastructure.  When you hear the term now it’s #fintech, referring to startups threatening to disrupt…

Read More

Context, Then Concepts, Words Last

The “five forces of context” (mobile, social media, data, sensors and location) have be called the future of computing. Why? Because they may finally give computers the ability to understand “your context”. Analysts under time and deadline pressure need to know that the information distilled by an AI solution is relevant to their context and…

Read More

Good Concept Detection Requires an “Almost Engine”

Is “almost” good enough?  In terms of concept detection, the answer is most certainly “yes”.  In another guest post by Tom Marsh, CTO at Boulder Equity Analytics, Tom argues that textual analysis using BEA’s AI software allows analysts to efficiently cull through mounds of documents to eliminate the noise.  What is left are “scored” paragraphs…

Read More

Concepts are Key, Not Words

Some form of textual analysis has become a standard feature among services that offer summaries of large volumes of documents.  Natural Language Processing (NLP), deep learning and neural nets are buzz words we often hear.  But when you look under the hood, most of the functionality is based on keywords, word counts and rigid taxonomies. …

Read More