The Power of Expert Insights as Alternative Data

In today’s fast-paced world, data has become the lifeblood of business decision-making. Traditionally, financial analysts relied heavily on traditional data sources like company earnings reports, filings, and economic indicators. However, with the rapid rise of technology and the emergence of big data, a new type of data has emerged: alternative data. 

AlphaSense, a leading market intelligence platform, offers superlative alternative data, or alt data, under the Expert Insights suite of primary research. Expert Insights is an alternative data set that helps researchers gather comprehensive information on key industries and detect market signals through its expert transcript library and Expert Call Services.

Below, we explore what exactly alternative data is, how it has evolved over time, and why Expert Insights is an excellent source of this non-traditional content set.

Understanding Alternative Data

Alternative data refers to any non-traditional data sets that can be utilized by investors to gain insights into business trends, consumer behavior, and market dynamics. Unlike traditional data sources, like financial reports and surveys, alternative data encompasses a wide array of information gathered from various sources. These alt data sources include expert transcript libraries, app usage, social media platforms, satellite imagery, web scraping, IoT devices, and more.

Alternative data is divided into three categories based on whether it has been generated by  individuals, business processes, or sensors. Individual-generated alt data is typically unstructured data sourced by social media, app usage, or web traffic but also includes more structured sources like expert transcript libraries or expert networks.

While expert transcript libraries and expert networks both provide structured alternative data, AlphaSense is set apart from traditional expert networks and other market intelligence platforms in many ways such as lower costs, faster time to insight, and industry leading artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Alternative data sets are information that is published externally of a company and is used by hedge fund managers, institutional investors, and corporations to access unique insights on the investment process. Its primary purpose is to complement traditional datasets and offer unique perspectives for better, more well-rounded decision-making.

The main use cases for alternative data is to conduct research in: due diligence, portfolio management, consumer behavior, competitive landscaping, and private markets.

And companies are definitely digging into this non-traditional data set to better their business decisions and operations. For example, the former Vice President of Opportun suggested that 95% of their marketing for clientele was sourced via alternative data.

“95% of the marketing done was done through direct mail, sending out opportunities to customers that were identified through alternate data sources. Customers typically didn’t have a credit score, using some alternate data sources that the company was utilizing, as well as follow-up loans to customers that previously had paid off loans and have lost performance to be able to give customers the ability to get larger-sized loans.”

– Expert Transcript | Vice President, Oportun (Prior)

Furthermore, the former Executive Director of MSCI Inc. emphasized that startups are leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and AI to parse through large content sets in the way AlphaSense does.

“I mention there’s also some startups that are trying to use that approach. For the alternative data sources, so one aspect is using natural language processing and AI to look at things like news articles, social media posts, and filings and the reports themselves. One, sometimes it can be used to generate a signal in and of itself.

Other times maybe it’s used to trigger an update. There’s generally an annual update cycle, but always we detected that there’s some significant change in this area for this company so we should do an update.”

– Expert Transcript | Executive Director, MSCI Inc. (Prior)

Dive even deeper into the use cases of alternative data.

The Evolution of Alternative Data

The evolution of alternative data has been fueled by technological advancements and the exponential growth of digitization. In the early days, alternative data had limited industry applications and was primarily used by hedge funds and institutional investors seeking an edge in financial markets. They leveraged unconventional data sources, such as satellite imagery to track retail parking lots or credit card transaction data to gauge consumer spending patterns for insights on market movements.

However, as computing power increased and data storage became more accessible, the applications of alt data expanded beyond finance. Companies across various industries realized that alternative data could provide valuable insights for marketing research, supply chain management, and even healthcare. Today, alt data has become an indispensable resource for decision-makers looking to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive landscape.

In the Signals podcast, host Nick Mazing, Director of Research for AlphaSense, discussed alternative data for corporations with Michael Maloof, Director of Marketing at Earnest Analytics. They suggested that while alt data has been utilized integrally by hedge funds, its use in the corporate world has more potential to come.

“So, companies and consultants, they’re really just beginning to turn to these newer alt data sets, like transaction data, like web pricing data, to fill in their data mosaic, gain a fuller understanding of their markets.”

– Podcast | Michael Maloof, Director of Marketing, Earnest Analytics

You can watch the entire episode here to learn more about alternative data emergence in the corporate world.

 

AlphaSense has revolutionized the power of alternative data in its market intelligence platform with the addition of Expert Insights, offering access to proprietary expert calls and custom interviews. This, combined with the other content sets within AlphaSense, provide you with the most robust and comprehensive research platform in the world.

One expert explains that one of the biggest challenges of data science is the access to large historical sets of data itself. 

“I know you constantly hear that one of the biggest challenges with data science when you’re looking at large data sets over many years is just access to data, mapping data, being able to cleanly access data. You have alternative data that’s coming in that’s being able to displace. Large budgets are going to alternative data now that weren’t happening before. It’s not in equity research anymore. They’re paying millions of dollars for credit card transaction data that a small start-up is cleaning and doing all the correlation analysis for them.”

– Expert Transcript | Group Head, Visible Alpha (Prior)

Fortunately, AlphaSense has evolved the realm of structured alt data by innovating fast-tracked and streamlined access to large data sets through its expert transcript library and Expert Call Services. We explore these unique and innovative research methods in greater detail below. 

Expert Transcript Library

The expert transcript library available in AlphaSense provides access to a vast data set of quality expert call transcripts with audio powered by AI. By leveraging our expert transcripts and AI power, you can quickly gain proprietary insights from industry experts with first-hand experience ranging from current and former executives, competitors, employees and customers.

Exploring the expert transcript library allows researchers to easily uncover premium insights with our user-friendly platform and navigate any market with confidence.

Expert Call Services

Another form of structured alternative data is found in Expert Call Services. AlphaSense offers one-on-one phone consultations with industry experts in our library and custom sourced experts through our dedicated research team. Expert Call Services allows you to conduct customized interviews to extract granular insights on target subjects and produce individual-generated alt data that’s compliant just for you.

Read this blog to learn about the five top reasons to use Expert Call Services.

The Full Value of Expert Insights

Expert Insights is an excellent source for individual-generated data because it provides structured alternative data through our ever-growing expert transcript library and fast-tracked Expert Call Services. AlphaSense’s structured alternative data set provides you with broad industry coverage, powerful AI features, faster time to insight, and world-class compliance.

By unlocking the full value of Expert Insights, researchers, investors, and business alike can become subject matter experts within seconds. Below we explore the full value of Expert Insights in further detail.

Powerful AI Features

In addition to the aggregation of content into one platform, AlphaSense’s AI search technology allows researchers to eliminate manual research and quickly parse through documents to efficiently gather quality insights on any industry or topic. When combined with our award-winning AI, the expert transcript library and Expert Call Services are a vital resource for corporate start-ups, competitive intelligence, and institutional investors.

AlphaSense’s patented AI curates content relevant to you and allows you to easily uncover quality insights from expert interviews using Smart Summaries, Smart Synonyms™, and sentiment analysis. By leveraging purpose-built AI search technology, you can quickly surface relevant expert transcripts and find the perfect expert to engage with in a custom interview call within seconds.

Faster Time to Insight

Expert Insights brings you alternative data within seconds through its elevated user experience and at-a-glance insights that empower you to make sharper business decisions. You can get faster time to insight with Expert Insights by easily browsing transcript headlines and digestible 3-point summaries while using powerful AI features, search filters, and automated alerts.

AlphaSense’s user-friendly interface also allows you to jump straight to key topics with a hyperlinked table of contents and audio timestamps for easy navigation and access to voice inflections.

Broad Industry Coverage

AlphaSense has an incredibly fast-growing expert transcript library of over 33,000 expert calls across all industries that includes transcripts and audio. At its onset, alt data had limited industry applications with a sole emphasis on financials. As an expansive source of quality insights with broad industry coverage, Expert Insights provides alternative data across a range of industries including: healthcare, consumer, industrials, energy, materials, financials, utilities, and real estate.

World-Class Compliance

Compliance takes top priority at AlphaSense to deliver trustworthy alternative data for safety and peace of mind. Our dedicated compliance team carefully reviews each transcript to ensure it aligns with regulatory requirements, minimizing the risk of exposing primary research to material non-public information (MNPI). You’ll also gain access to our Compliance Portal for auditing all transcript activities and compliance questionnaires for complete transparency.

Unlock the Power of Alternative Data with Expert Insights

AlphaSense has revolutionized alternative data through the power of Expert Insights with proprietary AI search technology and advanced NLP-based features, saving investors from the typical frictions that keep crucial insights at bay. 

As alternative data continues to redefine the way businesses operate, harnessing its power has become a necessity to staying competitive in fast-paced markets. Expert Insights serves as an excellent example of an alt data source that empowers organizations to extract meaningful insights, optimize decision-making processes, and uncover hidden opportunities.

Researchers can unlock a new dimension of success in today’s data-driven world by unleashing the power of structured alternative data through AlphaSense’s advanced tools.

Start your free trial to unlock the power of Expert Insights as alternative data today.