The idea behind the Alacra Pulse Platform was to give our clients a handle of what was happening in the alternative media space – the blogosphere. There's valuable information for both idea generation and current awareness being published by reputable blogs, and our clients had no way to curate and integrate this data into their workflow. Street Pulse, our first release, finds and aggregates analyst comments from all over the web – traditional and alternative media – and covers what sell-side analysts, rating agency analysts, industry analysts and some carefully vetted bloggers have to say about companies.
Our first two Pulse clients, an accounting firm and a management consultancy, jumped on Pulse because they are significant consumers of traditional sell-side investment research. Like everyone outside the money management industry, their access to sell-side research is embargoed or simply non-existent. The embargo for some sell-side firms is 2 weeks, for many others it can be months. Street Pulse delivers what the analysts are saying without waiting for access to the research reports. And analysts are often quoted in the online press separate and apart from writing a research note, so we are aggregating reputable opinions in a way that hasn't been previously available. This is what we intended for Pulse. What's happened since has been both surprising and exciting:
- Compliance executives at a mid-size bank approached Alacra's UK team with concerns about recent FSA regulatory actions involving pre-hedging and front-running. The bank needs to uncover unusual trading activity and determine if it aligns with market rumors – they need to be on top of potential instances of front-running. The bank needed a cost-effective source of tagged, near-real-time data to incorporate into their monitoring process and a feed of Pulse data met their requirements exactly.
- Another bank needed to be alerted to news about their counterparties – they called it (and we're calling it) Counterparty Intelligence. Here we're combining data from our Pulse platform with Alacra's Corporate Event Feed which is produced by Alacra's Concordance team. We track any and all changes to a company that might affect their mapping and we create a feed of this data for customers. This combined with content from Deal Pulse and Weak Pulse allows the bank to monitor information that may affect their counterparties. They've found great value in "proactive data management."
- Fidelity integrated Street Pulse data into their just launched Stock Research Center on Fidelity.com. The goal of the Stock Research Center is to help drive idea generation by providing users with the types of research tools often used by institutional investors.
- We spoke with one of our partners, American Lawyer Media, about Pulse and they immediately saw opportunities to bring the product to the law firm market. ALM is now reselling Pulse into their customer base of leading US law firms.
We have a number of other vertical market applications for Pulse that have been suggested to us by customers and partners that we're working on now. With an openly available version of Street Pulse on the web and easy to access APIs, it's easy for customers to see what you're doing and apply it to their specific needs.
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