INTERVIEW 🎙️ John Farrall, Vertical Knowledge: How Hard is to Collect & Clean Alternative Data
Channel: Beryl Elites
Date: 2023-12-20

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INTERVIEW 🎙️ featuring:
John Farrall, Alternative Data Executive, Vertical Knowledge
Derricke Dennis, Anchor, ABC News

You're looking at data that you collect on the worldwide web and there's a lot of it out there .. 
❖ "We collect data to help decision makers make better decisions .. organize it and present it in such a fashion that decision makers can have more information at their fingertips. " 

What piques your interest when you look at the data?
❖ "We mostly listen to our customers and when they tell us, ‘Here's something that's of interest to us, can you go out and collect this information’. We then do our best to set up a process, where we collect the data, clean, complete, consistent in a manner that is very usable from the end users perspective."

In terms of the end user they're varied ..
❖ "Our biggest customer has been the U.S. government. And then we sell to the folks here at Beryl Elites conference, a lot of these hedge funds and big institutional investors. The use case for them which is our biggest growth engine at the moment is to help them better understand the stocks and industries they are investing in using data they might not have otherwise had access to, as they make these decisions."

Are there any risks involved in some of the data that you're collecting?
❖ "It's hard to do what we do. It gets even more difficult when you start talking about doing it at scale. So, collecting information from thousands of different sites daily-weekly-monthly basis. It's a real challenge to do it and we need to be on top of that. So, not if but when something goes wrong, we need to be able to identify and notify our customers to fix it on the fly. It's kind of like fixing a jet engine while you're flying and make sure that going forward, it is produced in the correct manner."

Why do companies need these data from the web, is that where their customer base is? 
❖ "It's really is where a large chunk of business is done these days. So, if you're any sort of consumer facing company, you're going to have a presence on the web. All your competitors are going to have a presence on the web, your customers are going to be seeking you out on the web. You need to have an understanding about what's going on with your competitors for competitive intelligence. If you're an investor and you're investing in these companies you want to understand what they're doing with pricing, inventory, what type of products they're selling, what type of brands they're are listed on their site, what's doing well, what's not doing well. That gives you some edge, some insight into the way the company is working, that is going to help you to have more conviction in buying or selling the stock."

Is this proprietary information, are you feeding it out to different companies? 
❖ "It's all publicly available information. We web scraping, collecting the information off the web. You can't fake logins, that sort of thing. So, this is all information that's public available to anybody, who'd like to go, grab it. We just go grab it and then organize it in a way that it's easier to work with and we do on a consistent basis. So, we have history going back in some case over 10-12 years, where we're collecting it every day or every week to give you some sense of what happens over the course of time and different economic environments. And gives you some insight into what might happen as things change going forward."

Because it's all public information there are competitors out there who are doing the same thing you are so how do you differentiate your company? 
❖ "There are a lot of competitors and people will say this can be easy to do. It's very difficult to do well and it's very difficult to do well at scale and we've managed to do that. There's another angle on this, which is when you talk about institutional investment firms, it's very heavily regulated and so, there's a lot of rules that you need to make sure you're in compliance with. We've helped shape those rules because we've been doing this for so long (2006), we worked closely with both our customers and the regulatory bodies in the space to really understand what we can do and cannot do."


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