Platform is trained to act like a credit analyst.
Bitvore is a “continuous analysis engine,” Jeff Curie, CEO of the firm, told ThinkAdvisor in an interview. It’s designed to “monitor information as it’s changing, and look for very specific things.”
The platform is trained to act like a credit analyst, he said, especially in municipal markets, where it’s “monitoring the issuers of municipal debt.” Bitvore is rolling out a new product that will cover corporate information, he said.
“We can correlate the news about a change in an issuer all the way down to the CUSIP number,” he explained, “and alert them when something happens.”
Curie said about 350,000 articles flow through the system each day, and “99.5% are not material” to bond managers. “You really can’t put human beings at this scale of problem and do it well,” he said. “AI is a really good fit. It automates a repetitive — basically drudgery — problem for very highly paid people.”
“The AI is trained to watch for the things that a credit analyst watches for; so it’s looking for things that would affect the risk of the bond,” he said. “We’re watching for things that would cause revenue to fall: taxation issues, unemployment problems, lawsuits against a hospital, changes in executive management, a nursing strike – all these things would affect a bond and its ability to pay.”
Curie calls this analytic support “automated intelligence. Our aim is not to do the trading for them,” he said. “Our aim is to make people have all the information they need at their fingertips.”
Curie said his firm took inspiration from Google in designing the output for Bitvore customers. They can get alerts at the time they specify, or get on-demand information through a web portal.
Traders “want to go in and look at something on demand because it’s something that came up in the secondary market, or something a customer is calling about, it’s something that their buy side bought and they’re out there trying to sell it,” he explained.
Bitvore launched in 2015, Curie said, and has been picked up by three out of the four major ratings agencies, as well as other large wealth managers, insurers and fund companies.
“Now the buy side has all this information, so the sell-side guys feel they have a disadvantage,” Curie said. “Now the sell side wants it because they want to know what the buy side knows.”