AFTAs 2018: Most Innovative Third-Party Vendor (Trading, Risk and Research)—Visible Alpha

As pressure to generate alpha increases, financial institutions are more than ever looking to be more efficient in their daily workflows to be able to focus on the more important and value-added tasks. Investment research technology provider Visible Alpha provides investors with the ability to evaluate underlying assumptions analysts make on companies. This is combined with access to brokers’ investment research, forward events calendar and information about past interactions with the firm. It is due to its platform that serves both the buy side and sell side that Visible Alpha takes home the award for the most innovative third-party vendor in the trading, risk and research category at the 2018 AFTAs.

Since it launched in February 2017, Visible Alpha has helped investment firms of various sizes and geographies become compliant with the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), which went live on Jan 3, 2018. Scott Rosen, CEO at Visible Alpha, says the firm helps buy-side investors “cut through the noise” and maximize the value they receive from sell-side research providers. Through its platform, Visible Alpha is working to improve and increase collaboration between both sides of the industry when it comes to investment research. 

“By helping investors leverage broker content more effectively, Visible Alpha helps the sell side with their core mission of servicing their clients. These efforts are enhanced by Visible Alpha’s sell-side intelligence tools to help them better understand their own views in context,” Rosen says. 

During 2018, Visible Alpha secured $38 million in funding from institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Banco Santander, Exane BNP Paribas, Macquarie Group, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo. This is in addition to its existing investors—Bank of America, Citi, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley and UBS. It also received funding from HSBC. 

Visible Alpha now has more than 600 content contributors to its Insights platform, which ingests sell-side models and integrates them into comparable views across analysts. This provides investment managers with detailed forecast data and unique analytics.

Rosen says the firm is currently focusing on further integrating Insights with Inbox, its research management solution that unifies content experiences across internal and external research, events and models. It is also working to provide tools to discover relevant insights and changes for investors based on their interests and focus, and will continue to grow its company coverage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Rosen says a bigger push into Asia-Pacific will also be a major focus in the coming months.