FirstRain Named IDC Innovator in Financial Compliance and Risk Analytics
FirstRain is proud to announce that it has been recognized as an IDC Innovator in a recent report that identifies key players pioneering the U.S. financial compliance and risk analytics markets.
In this report, IDC highlights how FirstRain customers use the FirstRain Business Web Graph, fact extraction, and event detection to know their customers better and gain new insights into their customers and operations, as well as financial services compliance (e.g., Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence).
The FirstRain Business Web Graph is central to providing meaningful (high-resolution) information across FirstRain solutions. In additional to SaaS based apps, customers can also leverage FirstRain at the data level, via a categorization pipeline that measures dynamic information based on the strength of relevance, noise and nature of the subject, and weighs linkages between related industries, companies and topics that can be customized for each customer. The result is that FirstRain delivers a level of disambiguation and meaning-based through analytics that far exceeds the relevance and quality that can be achieved through search or keyword-matching approaches.
Quoting from the IDC press release, “Financial firms remain under pressure from regulators to improve the effectiveness of their compliance and risk management analysis and reporting,” said Bill Fearnley, research director, Compliance, Fraud and Risk Analytics at IDC Financial Insights. “To stay ahead of bad actors and improve their compliance and fraud detection programs, financial firms are increasing investments in analytics tools and new sources and types of data.”
What to learn more about how we are helping Financial firms? Please contact us!
FirstRain is proud to have been recommended as an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Vendor to Watch. EMA “Vendors to Watch” are companies that deliver unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed or that provide value in innovative ways. The designation rewards vendors that “dare to go off the beaten path” [one of our favorite things to do!] and have defined their own market niches.
FirstRain was recognized based on our advanced data science, smart content acquisition, and information space modeling that drives personalization for every business professional at hundreds of global Fortune 1000 companies. As part of this endorsement, FirstRain was evaluated on our ability to provide accurate and meaningful insights to customer facing teams in real-time, reducing risks through instant understanding of customer and market events. FirstRain was proven to advance both the quality and frequency of customer engagement as well as guide activity that drives growth and opportunity.
This week FirstRain’s COO YY Lee gave an advanced-level class to Big Data TechCon conference attendees on how to develop and drive personalization of information experience in a Big Data world. Personalization is quickly becoming an assumed part of technology UX. These rapid advances, also affected by increased expectations set by flagship consumer apps create a need and an opportunity for enterprise software to deliver personalized experiences inside traditional applications and workflows. YY’s class covered data and analytics techniques for building user profiles, leveraging explicit and implicit factors into the process, and addressing the challenges of user behavior and expectations in order to create a highly adaptive, individualized information experience.
As part of her class, YY spoke to the fact that the application of information science techniques is core to creating a very personal mobile era user experience. She shared some of the lessons learned by the FirstRain R&D team, who are pioneers in developing and introducing our customers to an adaptive and pragmatic semantic information space model – a model that allows for the marriage of deep data science and personal business analytics. FirstRain technology understands human perspective, awareness and preferences to deliver analytics with each user in mind. YY advised what factors can be leveraged to build profiles and nuanced understanding of users including: building rationally-derived/real life characteristics; isolating real–time, structural, transient, in the moment user preferences; leveraging common personal tendencies; etc. “We are successful when a person looks at the application and thinks: Wow, this is me! This is exactly what I need to do my job today’, said YY.
She also talked about the importance of developing and applying skepticism filters to discover, for example, whether any given case ‘in-doubt’ is an opportunity for a non-linear development or if the system really got it wrong and needs to be re-educated. She also mentioned the importance of human analyst inputs in the process of building precise personalization models to further refine information and adopt it to deliver better results each time. Other methodologies in developing personalization were discussed such as correlations, pattern recognitions, network relationships, leveraging external data, etc.
During this class, YY highlighted that the best opportunity to create the user experience that says “this is about me, my job, and what I need to know at this moment” is to develop a fine balance of information space modeling and user data modeling in your apps. She wrapped up an engaging discussion by sharing her team’s advice for some simple ways to get started personalizing your data delivery:
1. Find easy ways to customize – learn and refine your work. Users often have little appetite to providing input, therefore the developer needs to carefully select their points of engagement.
2. Start with easy tricks to customize by making the UX feel personal, such as simply adding a profile picture.
3. Start with the personalization characteristics that are easy and obvious to your user and how they use your apps: what role the person is in, what place they live, etc.
4. You don’t have to start by solving really big problems
5. Moderation and balance are important in providing suggestions. Change is sometimes difficult for a user. Too many choices may be annoying. Learn the art of notification by selecting things with the right information density.
5. Minimize the mysteries to minimize risks. Explain where the content is coming from: ‘I am showing you this because of X”
6. Inject small reminders for personalizations through the whole user so that the user can be in charge.
If you are interested in having YY come to your next event to talk about driving truly personal information experiences, please contact us!
D&B’s Business Information Products Now Powered by FirstRain’s Advanced Analytics; Customers in Any Market Can Immediately Maximize Sales Opportunities
SHORT HILLS, N.J. & SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– D&B (NYSE:DNB), the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, and FirstRain, a leading provider of customer insights for the enterprise, today announced a partnership to deliver a ground-breaking solution combining structured and unstructured business data and analytics. The solution will provide a 360-degree view of a company that unifies relevant social content with D&B’s leading commercial content in a simple and seamless manner that is easy to use and integrate into business applications, in near real time.
“As we continuously look for opportunities to strengthen our position as the market leader in B2B data intelligence, finding and identifying solutions that solve unmet customer needs is crucial to our success,” said Laura Kelly, Chief Product Officer, D&B. “The relationship with FirstRain will enable our customers to receive up-to-the-minute insights on prospects, customers, competitors and key markets, especially in today’s social age where companies have immediate needs for deep insight. FirstRain’s company and industry social analytics combined with D&B’s world-class structured data gives customers advanced warning of sales and growth opportunities in their markets, when and where they need it.”
Under a long-term strategic agreement, FirstRain provides D&B with customer and market intelligence, which D&B delivers through its world class solutions. The agreement with Silicon Valley-based FirstRain, an emerging leader in big data analytics, builds on D&B’s commitment to investing in and providing its customers with breakthrough and innovative services.
Going far beyond traditional news feeds, FirstRain big data analytics on unstructured information, including social media conversations on Twitter and blogs, deliver highly relevant, real-time insights on companies, markets and competitors to sales and marketing teams. FirstRain users have a superior understanding of their customer’s businesses, uncovering greater opportunities and risks, and ultimately driving smarter business decisions and accelerating growth.
“The integration of FirstRain’s analytics with D&B’s sales and marketing intelligence will enhance D&B’s profiles, setting them apart from commoditized products in the market,” said Harry Henry, VP & Practice Leader at Outsell, Inc. “This partnership allows D&B to offer relevant new content, from a wide range of sources including social media, to millions of users across different industries.”
D&B users now have access to FirstRain’s first-level analytics integrated directly within the D&B solutions including Hoovers, D&B360, D&B Direct and First Research®. The combination of D&B data and insight on more than 230 million businesses, 100 million business executives and three million corporate family trees linked via the D&B DUNS® Number with FirstRain’s real- time insights on customers and markets sets the standard for business data analytics.
“Our partnership with D&B is a tremendous milestone for FirstRain,” said Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain. “D&B is the global leader in business information and we are excited to bring the powerful insights that FirstRain extracts through real-time unstructured data analytics to their customer base through this partnership.”
About Dun & Bradstreet (D&B)
Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE:DNB) is the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies to Decide with Confidence® for 172 years. D&B’s global commercial database contains more than 230 million business records. The database is enhanced by D&B’s proprietary DUNSRight® Quality Process, which provides our customers with quality business information. This quality information is the foundation of our global solutions that customers rely on to make critical business decisions.
D&B provides two solution sets that meet a diverse set of customer needs globally. Customers use D&B Risk Management Solutions™ to mitigate credit and supplier risk, increase cash flow and drive increased profitability; and D&B Sales & Marketing Solutions™ to provide data management capabilities that provide effective and cost efficient marketing solutions and to convert prospects into clients by enabling business professionals to research companies, executives and industries.
FirstRain is a pioneer and leader in customer insights solutions for the enterprise. FirstRain’s cross-platform solutions provide sales, marketing and finance professionals with analytics tuned to their specific company strategy, allowing them to deeply understand their customer’s business and their markets. FirstRain’s patented, advanced analytics technology finds business-focused Web and social media and then integrates it seamlessly into the world’s premier CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco WebEx Social, Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics, Jive and Yammer. This intelligence is similarly incorporated into leading research platforms such as Fidelity.com, Interactive Data and Mergent. Based in San Mateo, California, FirstRain also has offices in New York and Gurgaon, India.
For more than three years, FirstRain has been delivering big data insights to our Fortune 500 customers through the power of the Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. Today, we are excited to announce an expanded partnership with Salesforce and an upgraded version of FirstRain Customer Insights on their AppExchange.
The more than ten thousand FirstRain enterprise sales and marketing customers that access our service through Sales Cloud will now enjoy an even richer and more deeply embedded customer intelligence experience within salesforce.com. And the deepened relationship between our two companies means enterprise sales and marketing professionals can more effectively tap into the power of social and mobile cloud technologies to accelerate their businesses.
Our expansion into the AppExchange will not force our users to learn a new way of working; FirstRain’s Customer Insights are streamed and embedded directly into the salesforce client to help drive revenue by making every salesperson as informed as your top 10% achievers.
We’ll be showcasing the newly expanded Customer Insights solution at Dreamforce 2013, November 18-21, in San Francisco, California. See you there!
