The COVID-19 pandemic has put extra pressure on CFOs. Not only do they have to make new investment decisions in this rapidly changing world, but they also must demonstrate to investors the future resilience and sustainability that these investments will bring.
In this new normal, models built on traditional data are no longer reliable. CFOs must instead depend on the only solid ground available: causal explanations of the complex relationships between drivers, business KPIs (including demand and costs), the new dynamics of markets, competitors and governments. An understanding of the forces acting on a company in this new world must be coupled with predictions about these drivers such as the new requirements related to business travel, the impact on supply chains of plant closings and transportation disruptions, the continuation of work from home and so forth.
This knowledge exists in a fragmented way, distributed across millions of news articles and reports published around the world that even the most efficient teams cannot consume and analyze. Beyond what’s commonly thought of as “data”, mining knowledge from vast amounts of text is an unusual way to find valuable new perspectives on companies, industries and macroeconomic topics.
Enter Causality Link.
Founded by an accomplished group of system designers, natural language processing experts, data scientists and software developers, Causality Link collects and aggregates more than 50,000 texts every day in 24 different languages, in real-time, through its AI-powered research assistant system to find explicit cause-and-effect statements relating to indicators and events. “Combining these causal links with predictive analytics provides valuable insights and forecasts on macroeconomic and microeconomic topics such as market demands and trends for CFOs to understand how their new strategies and investments could be perceived by the market,” says Pierre Haren, Ph.D., the CEO and cofounder of Causality Link.
Causality Link’s cloud-based platform, called “Research Assistant”, tags and extracts performance indicators, events, trends and causal links describing the market forces acting overtime on commodities, equities, industries and countries. The extracted information is stored in a data lake to be aggregated on-demand along many dimensions: companies, industries, portfolios or competitors; all while leveraging explainable and transparent causal models and predictions.
Delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), data-as-a-service (DaaS), or via Causality Link Dashboards, the Research Assistant provides a detailed analysis at the company, industry or country-level which can always be traced back to the original texts from which the information has been extracted. The SaaS offering is a realtime, web-based platform. At the same time, the DaaS mechanism is an hourly alternative data feed of the extracted meta-data hosted on Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Cloud that can be leveraged with well-known business intelligence tools such as Tableau.
Having carved a unique niche, Causality Link recently announced significant updates to its groundbreaking Research Assistant platform. The upgrades include an increased number of content providers and languages ingested, the creation of custom ESG indexes, and the launch of additional services targeted towards parsing customers’ internal documents. With the new Research Assistant, proprietary internal parsing technology allows firms to analyze their documentation, including internal emails.
Enterprises use Research Assistant to gather insights by securely evaluating internal information and comparing it with public information, enabling them to compare internally generated data against crowd intelligence sourced globally. “We are proud of our team’s hard work to implement these new features for our clients. Now more than ever, CFOs and investors need the real-time global point of view provided by our Research Assistant,” says Haren. “The custom ESG indexes and internal parsing capabilities give CFOs the flexibility to analyze, measure and develop tailormade strategies, making the Research Assistant the ultimate team member.”
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