AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by companies and financial institutions. Since 2011, their AI-based technology has helped professionals make business decisions by delivering insights from public and private content—including company filings, event transcripts, news, trade journals, and equity research. The platform boasts users among 4,000 enterprise customers. Headquartered in New York City, AlphaSense employs over 1,000 people across offices in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and…
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Factiva
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Factiva from Dow Jones is a data service that helps companies identify opportunities, accelerate decisions and manage a business's reputation, that includes global news and data accessible via the Dow Jones' research platform, on mobile devices or integrated via advanced feeds and APIs.
Factiva compliments as provides the noise while AlphaSense focuses on the signal due to the consolidated broker coverage it supports; without comparison with Thomson Reuters.
AlphaSense has a superior search engine, which allows it to get very targeted research and news - thereby helping to cut down on noise, and improve efficiency and insights - which Factiva lags. On the other hand, it has more features compared to Sentieo or Amenity Analytics.
Not much compares to AlphaSense, it's my go to for research on public companies CapIQ is a comparator for analyst reports but they are easy to pull on AlphaSense
AlphaSense's smart search functionality is a huge differentiator versus these peers, particularly its ability to easily search through broker research (versus just filings/transcripts). In addition, AlphaSense makes it much easier to review multiple documents at once, and the …
Alphanses has pioneered the Sentiment analysis, earning summary, risk highlights and score and give access to broker research reports from well known borking house which were lacking in other platforms.
These databases are rather great at what they do. For example - MergerWare is great at M&A deals, BamSEC is great for company docs, etc. However, as an analyst, you have to craft information across these data sources which is what AlphaSense helps us with.
AlphaSense works very well for researching topics related to companies, technologies and/or industries. The information access is super useful. Sorting by search relevance and filtering by source type can help curate the information to what you are looking for. One area that could use some help is how to digest that information down to usable chunks. If your goal is to synthesize the information into your research, then the platform seems to have some tools to help do that, but it will still be a manual process. A CoPilot or similar integration could go a long way to improving the time to value of using this tool and the information it gathers for you.
A large part of our work depends on the ability to source quality media content from a breadth of dependable sources globally. This is Factiva's bread and butter: it has a very comprehensive list of 'quality' media sources such as nationals, dailies, business journals and magazines from around the world that are easily mined for the content they hold. If you're thinking about anything other than these 'traditional' media sources then Factiva probably isn't your thing. It doesn't do social media.
Factiva offers excellent search builders so that I am able to narrow my search to specific companies or topics very easily.
Factiva combines a large number of credible sources into one place and allows me to search all of these sources.
Factiva's use of timestamps helps me understand when the news was known by the market which allows me to analyze how (if at all) that particular piece of news impacted the company's stock price.
Provides an excellent starting place for learning about a company and/or industry.
AlphaSense is a very useful tool and is reasonably priced for our organization. While I may not be a hyper-active user, it's a great resource when I need to quickly do a competitive landscape survey, review publicly available documents (transcripts, etc.), or review Wall Street research
The ability to quickly move between transcripts/research is excellent, as is the previews generated of excerpts around search terms, and really increases efficiency/ability to find what you are looking for. The advanced search functionality is more challenging to use, and can some times be difficult to figure out how to set the exact parameters you are looking for (however, once you have the search in place, it is easy to amend)
The availability of Alphasense is great. I have used the software for multiple years and cannot remember ever having an outage issue. This is surprising actually, as I use other software applications that do not have regular outages, but still have outages periodically. Alphasense, on the other hand, never seems to have any outages. Good sign if I can't remember the software not working :).
Loading or performing searches on AlphaSense platform is reasonably fast for most of the time. However, it is sometimes unacceptably long for me to load PDF files (earnings presentation, supplementary financial report) on AlphaSense. Certain features might also take very long time, such as loading for "similar tables" across EDGAR filings, or downloading tables from EDGAR filings
Customer support is very prompt. I get personalized support for search recommendations and content that I could not find in my own search. Support checks in with me on a bi-monthly basis to keep me informed of the many different feature additions, I cannot find a more kind, understanding, and supportive team.
The person was prepared, attentive, understood the nature of my questions, was willing to work through any difficulties or misunderstandings, was patient, and super pleasant to work with. Great customer service.
Trainers address the basics, and such training was meant for new users. Instructions are really helpful by providing scenarios that our team will face in our daily tasks. It will be more thoughtful if the training is conducted by case studies so as to allow new users to get first-hand experience during the training.
We primarily use Aiera for live transcripts but their transcripts are not as accurate and a bit more glitchy. AlphaSense is really strong on that front and even organizes your printouts with smart summaries and a collection of all of your highlights. It is much better for organizing your thoughts.
At the time, Factiva was already being used by the company I worked for - they had developed procedures specifically for using Factiva, so there wasn't really an option. I've used Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg exclusively for legal research, so there wasn't really an overlap with Factiva.
The sharing features provides by AlphaSense mean that it can be readily scaled for teams within an organization and, subject to compliance requirements, with client organizations. The ability to share annotations of transcripts and investor releases is valuable, and facilitates collaboration between analysts.
AlphaSense has allowed us to generate deeper competitive insights. For example, we conducted an in depth analysis of the aerial data analytics (drone) industry, and AlphSense helped us narrow in on the market leaders and their various strengths / weaknesses.
AlphaSense has improved our team's overall efficiency. With Stream in particular, we are able to pinpoint insights in a matter of minutes through the transcript feature as opposed to having to conduct a series of calls ourselves. This is a significant time saver.
AlphaSense has allowed us to make more informed decisions on our public holdings by providing us with unfettered access to equity research analyst reports.