There are good days and bad days running a small company, and then there are great days that make it all worth while. I received the following email from a customer today about one of our support guys – this is what we aspire to for every customer!
Hi Penny – I hope you are doing well. I have been a customer of FirstRain, for the past several months. I just wanted to drop a line and let you know what an excellent job your team is doing. In particular, C*** has been extremely helpful in setting me up and working with me on some sophisticated searches. As someone who deals with a multitude of vendors, I am exposed to a wide range of customer service – I must say that C*** is at the top of my list. His is extremely responsive, very professional and, most of all, effective. Thank you again for your help and I look forward to a strong relationship with you and C*** moving forward.
Very best,
T***
The California team at FirstRain held a pumpkin carving contest again this year – following up from last year’s very successful competition. The challenge was to create a scary pumpkin. We had a bat and a blood sucking loan agent, but the winner was Sarah Palin – the scariest thing the winning team could think of this year (well this is California…).
This years carvers
The winning pumpkin: Sarah Palin
FirstRain announced two great pieces of momentum this morning: CalSTRS has become a client of FirstRain, and we’ve released new capability in our system to support pension governance.
I am proud to have CalSTRS as a client. Their reputation for rigor and integrity is unmatched – and deserved. They and the South Dakota Investment Council are our first two disclosable pension clients, and we’re seeing intense interest from pension funds globally as the pace of regulatory actions and change increases and shareholders sharpen their attention.
Pension governance is a specific set of requirements for pension funds. It involves automated monitoring and analysis of:
- Traditional corporate governance, which includes by-laws changes, anti-takeover provisions, executive compensation,, and board independence
- Rule-making processes at the government, financial exchange and global regulators
- Opinions, actions and statements of peer institutions, activist investors, and other global market participants
- Environmental & Social Responsibility trends, rules, and risk analysis
This is a timely introduction, as investment officers are under significant pressure to reduce governance risk in a systematic and repeatable way. The automated governance analysis process using FirstRain is a step in the right direction.
Today is an important day for FirstRain – we’re announcing a major partnership with FactSet Research Systems. There is a rapidly growing awareness of the importance of the web in financial research and we are thrilled that FactSet has selected FirstRain to be its partner on providing web data into their process. We are proud to work with such a highly-acclaimed market leader.
To put it in today’s context, as the market swings with unprecedented volatility, our customers on the buyside need complete information more than ever and cannot carry the risk of missing critical information about their investments. As Clint Anderson at Meritage Portfolio Management says:
“Prices react rapidly to new marketplace information, so it’s important to have as much of that information as possible. FirstRain consolidates hard-to-find data from the web on our portfolios, sectors, and industries. Integrating FirstRain with the analysis I do in FactSet provides a more complete picture of the market.”
For users who are customers for both Factset and FirstRain this will mean a more seamless research process. The FirstRain platform in now integrated into Marquee allowing a user to move from a Marquee view of a stock straight into a FirstRain view of the stock – and effectively adding the web as a new dataset into the Factset platform.
For FactSet users who are not yet FirstRain clients, we will offer a sample snapshot of company data and the ability to request up to 5 company tearsheets showing the FirstRain web view of the company.
FactSet is the second top tier financial platform to add web research capabilities into its platform, and the second to select FirstRain to do so – Capital IQ was the first.
As I have been talking with our clients these past few weeks, it’s obvious that the shakeout we’re chronicling in our free report: Eye On The Storm is certainly not over, but I’m hearing their confidence that, while this will be an ugly downturn, it is not the end of the world as we know it. And managing money hasn’t fundamentally changed. Investors still need high quality and complete information to make decisions from and both the web and FirstRain are seen more and more necessary components of the research process.
We’re developing an important new capability within FirstRain this month and there are many opinions and ideas knocking around the brainstorming meetings. As you can see here the ideas come in vibrant colors, and one of our lead researchers has come over from Gurgaon for a couple of weeks to play a key role in the design process.
Getting everyone’s ideas on the wall, organizing them into themes, and prioritizing the groups helps us build a richer product implementation. We believe you just get better products if you have a robust brainstorming methodology as a team.
Our users can comment on the web results we send them – marking them relevant or not relevant – and why. Ranjeet ran a word cloud on the feedback we’ve been getting – unedited – and I love the results!
Thanks to wordle.net for the word cloud.
The last two years have been a frenetic pace of product development – I’ll write a separate post on our approach there because it’s highly iterative and a little different – and customer appreciation of our product is very rewarding for the team. I have sent a letter (in email) to every production user thanking them for their business, for helping FirstRain get to this point and letting them know the new capabilities that will be in their hands in September.
The press release is on our web site – and has several customers named in it. However, the buyside is a secretive world and so most customers won’t let us use their names. I’m grateful to the customers listed who will!
I completely understand from their point of view – their research process is their critical IP – but it’s tough from a marketing perspective to not be able to name names. The press always wants to talk to a live person who is using and I have yet to find a portfolio manager who has the time or the inclination to take a lot of calls, unless they are a board member or an advisor. So be it – we just have to be persistent and creative in our marketing.
Katherine Heires wrote an in-depth article on the new space we’re pioneering yesterday – Blogging Filters Bringing Order to Chaotic Content. She’s done a good analysis of the new systems being developed to help investors make money from the web.
As blog postings and other content about stocks, market sectors, products and company actions permeate the Internet, time-pressed portfolio managers, traders and research analysts are finding it harder and harder to keep pace. But a new generation of research providers is working to change that with algorithms and pattern-matching technology that aggregates and analyzes a seemingly impenetrable body of information.
“In a market where prices are changing all the time, the person who has the best information about any event that might impact a trading price has an advantage–and that includes unstructured data that has been filtered for quality, reliability and relevance,” says Patricia McGinnis, research director with IDC affiliate Financial Insights and co-author of a June report on the subject.
Katherine has interviewed me several times now and I was pleased with the section of her article about FirstRain.
“Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light,” notes FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher, who calls them a “blind spot” for institutional investors. “Manually finding the meaningful information from the volume of meaningless chatter is just not practical, even for the largest firms.”
Foster City, Calif.-based FirstRain last month introduced Blog Monitor, which uses an algorithm that looks at “prominence, reach and authority” to identify the most influential sites. A standard search engine relies on popularity as a measure, says Herscher.
“There is a big difference between working with a standard search engine, where you have to put in a query to get a response, and a continuous search service–which is what we do–that is reading all the blogs for you, prioritizing the information, normalizing it and proactively reporting information to you, for example, when there has been a volume change of activity,” adds Herscher.
For the service, eight-year-old FirstRain built a Web-results database, prioritizing and pulling out trends from blogs, according to Herscher, who says the task wasn’t easy. “The Web is so junky and chaotic and full of duplicate information,” she observes, “but now that we have the database built, we can keep adding relevant analytics.” The service, which allows users to select pertinent companies and topics, currently offers impact reports on the investing, technology, energy and health care sectors.
I was delighted to check my blackberry at 4:30am this morning on my way to the airport and see a positive reference on FirstRain on Infectious Greed. Paul Kedrosky has been evaluating the system and he posted to his blog:
“I’m trying out the FirstRain markets monitoring service, courtesy of the fine folks there, and so far I highly recommend it”
Alongside of the terrific coverage in Wall Street and Technology today – these made my day.
