This article is a guest post by Aiera’s CEO Ken Sena, discussing how modern financial services companies can benefit from seamless access to investor events in real-time in order to make better decisions.
How Work-From-Home Made Virtual Events the Norm
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked 10 years of virtualization in a matter of months. All of a sudden nearly everyone was working from home, attending Zoom meetings, socializing with friends on “virtual happy hours”, and attending live-streamed business conferences and presentations.
Good or bad, the rapid virtualization of all kinds of events has far-reaching implications, particularly in the world of finance.
As the world continues its trend towards virtualized events, the investment industry is experiencing new pain points, mostly around the tracking, accessibility, consumption, and understanding of a rapidly-increasing number of virtual issuer communications, such as:
- Earnings calls
- Conference presentations
- Shareholder meetings
- Investor days
Specifically, while Work-From-Home has mitigated the travel and lost time between meetings, allowing more meeting events to be attended in a single day, it has obviously not alleviated the physical limitation of attending more than one meeting at a time, whether that’s simultaneous corporate access invitations or multiple earnings calls.
The Rise of Financial Event Monitoring Platforms
This can’t-be-everywhere-at-once problem has led to strong growth for companies like Aiera, which provides one-click access, transcription, multicasting, and AI-powered analytics across over 70,000 corporate events per year – from earnings calls to industry conferences to macro events to shareholder meetings and beyond.
These investor events are hosted by hundreds of different providers in countries around the world, at any hour of day or night. In fact, during the peak of the earnings season, it is not unusual to have several hundred events running concurrently and to have 1,000+ events in a single day. And until recently, the norm was to dial into these events via phone, or access via webcast link – a narrow and inefficient process for somebody with any level of coverage beyond just a few names.
Dialing into, and following along with a single event often comes at the expense of other events happening on the periphery – creating blind spots across an investor’s coverage and positions.
How Aiera Eliminates Investor Blind Spots
EXAMPLE: Let’s say you cover the tech sector, and Amazon and Google are reporting their quarterly earnings at the exact same time. Both are relatively major holdings of yours, and there are portions of each call that you know will require your closest attention.
Event Access & Monitoring platforms like Aiera solve this exact scenario.
Aiera allows for playback, search, and speed control, syncing the audio and text of the event for efficient comprehension. For instance, while investor events are happening, you can highlight sections of text with in-line notes to yourself or your team and then easily switch to the next event, picking up where you left off. Or, as an alternative, you can multicast the events side-by-side and follow along with a seamless stock price reaction.
Learn more about Aiera’s features here.
How Does Event Monitoring Software Work?
To ensure the maximum breadth of quality event coverage, Aiera has developed a complex, multipronged approach to sourcing investor events. Most events are hosted in one or both ways: a phone call, or a webcast. If a phone number is available for a given event, Aiera attempts to auto-connect to the call; and, if necessary, allow a human agent to intervene and interact with an operator before handing it back to the AI for transcription.
Aiera’s group of agents is responsible for manually reviewing every event before it occurs, correcting any data integrity issues, flagging certain events for deeper review, and performing any pre-registration or notifications that might be necessary. Agents are further tasked with monitoring live streams and providing support should any issue arise during the broadcast.
This process, which combines best-in-class automation with targeted human intervention, has allowed Aiera to provide the most comprehensive calendar coverage possible (with access to thousands more events than the next-best option) with the highest successful connection rates in the industry (> 95% across all events).
The Case for Interoperability
Aiera is not alone in wanting its users’ time and attention. There are so many different services and applications that are battling for attention, and investors only have so much mental bandwidth and time that they can devote to each.
This is called the “screen problem.”
Until recently, service providers tackled the “screen problem” by trying to boil the ocean, creating sprawling, complex, and poorly designed services that try to replace all possible competitors. This approach creates unhappy clients, as no single service is truly able to serve every investor’s demand adequately.
In much the same way that Aiera has solved the can’t-be-everywhere-at-once problem with events, the screen problem is what interop platforms such as Glue42 are working to solve – by creating a centralized place where all disparate software and services are interconnected and work together seamlessly.
Smart, interoperable dashboards allow investors to tailor a single screen to perfectly serve their workflows. For example, your Aiera Event Calendar can be immediately scoped to watchlists established on Bloomberg or Factset. It can also tie into approved order management, charting, and research management solutions that are available.
“We are seeing an influx in meetings and events, and a need to manage this growing event flow more efficiently, that is here to stay,” said Ken Sena, Co-founder and CEO, Aiera. “This is why we are so excited to be working with Glue42 and together finding new and exciting ways to bring Aiera’s event monitoring efficiency into investor workflows.”
READ MORE: Trader Desktop Interoperability Comes of Age (via A-Team Group)
FDC3: The Interop Standard
At the heart of this connectivity are FDC3 standards—a common language and API that applications can use to easily communicate with each other.
Founded in 2017, the FDC3 consortium was assembled to create an open standard for information sharing between different applications, allowing different components to talk to each other from within a single desktop experience. By doing so, any individual service can focus on creating a single outstanding experience for a specific use case (such as event transcription and analysis), and the investor can devote attention to only one dashboard.
As firms look to services like Glue42 to support their interoperability projects, they will naturally vet applications that are FDC3-compliant (like Aiera), so they can expect out-of-the-box connectivity with the rest of the services they rely on.
“While the Aiera user interface is available as a browser-based SaaS offering and mobile app, there is a natural benefit for Aiera to be included in an interop platform due to the nature of typical end-user workflows,” said James Wooster, COO, Glue42. “Given the many applications necessary for a portfolio manager, analyst, trader or quant, there is tremendous competition for screen space and a need for communication between applications.”
“This next-gen technology fits very cleanly into the workflows and workspaces of many Glue42 customers,” he continued. “Adding Aiera to the Glue42 platform brings an exciting new capability that will provide significant business benefit. It’s a highly complementary offering.”
For more information, visit https://glue42.com/partner-directory/aiera/
About Aiera
Aiera is the only LIVE event monitoring & financial search platform covering all available Wall Street events, providing real-time transcription, one-click audio, DVR-style live audio controls, smart document search, dynamic alerts, and seamless team collaboration via bookmarks and note-taking. Aiera covers over 77,000 earnings calls, investor events, and conferences annually (with a 95%+ live connection rate), spanning more than 10,000 global equities; all accessible via desktop, mobile app, API, iFrame, and interop widgets.
To learn more about Aiera, please visit https://www.aiera.com/.
