Excel, email, and Evernote are still some of the most commonly used technologies across investment firms during the research process. Yet, Excel is 36 years old, email over 50 years old, and even Evernote is approaching nearly two decades in the business. While these tools have played a valuable role in the investment research process, it’s safe to say their innovation has long been maxed out.
So when the pandemic hit, it upended how Sentieo’s customers operated, and every firm was forced to consider technology in ways they simply hadn’t before. Swati Tyagi, Vice President, Product at Sentieo asks: “If you couldn’t be in the office to access a Bloomberg terminal or walk down the hall to discuss the latest findings with a portfolio manager, what would you do? Our cloud-based platform made the answer easy.”
Like many organisations, Sentieo adapted to the early pandemic by being cautious and limiting investments. But, as they reached the middle of 2020, they saw an incredible wave of demand to support distributed research and teams.
“Our AI and other innovations alleviated their greatest research workflow challenges and, in turn, we were able to navigate through the turbulent business environment,” says Tyagi.
In recent months, Sentieo has noticed an accelerated drive to the cloud and AI by all types of institutional investors, both in response to the pandemic, but also due to a realisation that these technologies can provide opportunities for productivity improvements, cost saving, and alpha generation.
That recognition has been a boon for Sentieo’s business. “We were fortunate that, when financial centres shut down, our clients could continue to use our cloud-based platform with no interruptions, licence challenges, or security concerns caused by working from home,” says Tyagi.
Supporting staff and clients
This led the firm to double down on investments around how to support distributed teams with capabilities like NLP-powered search, integration with collaboration tools like Slack, and making it easier for teams to work consistently with tools like dashboard sharing. “We also increased investment in our customer success teams to enable the shift to remote operations for our clients,” Tyagi adds.
The three top areas Sentieo clients are asking the firm to invest in are:
– NLP-Powered Search: While NLP and ML tools are becoming a ‘must have’ for all investment professionals, financial document search is still in the early adopter market phase.
– Integrations: Investment research platforms exist in an ecosystem of content, systems and market data terminals; thus, there needs to be a broad range of ways of integrating with existing workflows, systems, content and data sources.
– Research Workflow: A modern, search-first research management system (RMS) is becoming the centralised hub of an analyst’s workflow.
Sentieo’s primary business goal is to help more investors shift from the legacy of the old research stack they have deployed to a modern collaborative investment research platform, driving the mission of its product development team who are constantly working to improve the existing platform and extend its capabilities.
“For instance, the growing emphasis on ESG research led us to announce an integration with Sustainalytics ESG Risk Ratings reports earlier this year,” Tyagi says.
As the pandemic continues to recede, Sentieo predicts that more and more investment firms will seek out technology, not for technology’s sake, but to deliver time savings and better insights, analyst collaboration, and ultimately better research for their clients.
Swati Tyagi, Vice President, Product, Sentieo
Swati Tyagi serves as Vice President of Product at Sentieo. She has 16 years of Product Management experience leading conceptualisation, development, and growth of B2B SaaS products for various industries across the globe. Prior to Sentieo, Tyagi worked for Diligent Corporation, a leading platform for Governance, Risk, and Compliance, where she led the product team for Diligent’s flagship product and helped transform it from a point solution into an integrated platform used by 50 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies. Tyagi holds a BSc degree from CCS University in India.
