The time has come for investors to embrace and leverage tonal analytics.
That's according to Sean Austin, the CEO at Helios Life Enterprises, a fintech specializing in alpha generation insights derived from human language and emotion.
Austin recently spoke with Benzinga about updates to his company’s product portfolio, as well as how investors can look past surface-level speech to uncover the hidden meanings of language and emotion.
Context: Founded in 2017, Helios uncovers valuable data for trading decisions via tonal analytics. The company’s core products are the Mercury and Comprehend Voice Analytics API.
Mercury unlocks the human voice at scale, allowing end-users to analyze audio event calls for tonal sentiment. On the other hand, Comprehend is more so holistic, taking in audio from a variety of business events, and extracting distinct data for analysis.
After 12 months of research and development, Comprehend: Elite comes as the newest iteration of Helios’ product portfolio.
“It’s ten times the value of what we’ve done,” Austin said on the institutional-focused product that will be ready for a wider audience on March 3, 2022.
“The value is driven by full coverage of 4,400 public companies in the U.S., which is essentially four and a half times what we covered before,” he noted.
The Elite product also boasts an upgrade in the company’s tonal fingerprinting and generates around 60 basis points of added alpha in backtesting.
Though the data sets are available through Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point and FactSet Research Systems Inc (NYSE:FDS), there are discussions to expand Helios’ reach to platforms like S&P Global Inc (NYSE:SPGI).
“You can think of them as online catalogs. Hedge funds and institutions integrate into these big platforms like Bloomberg and FactSet to get all the information,” Austin added.
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Recent Events: Alongside Helios’ product portfolio expansion is the addition of massive data buyers – those with assets north of $100 billion under management.
“This is a massive validation. They have thousands of data sources, and they’re seeing value in this, which means they’re not getting it from their existing pool of data,” Austin explained.
Helios also plans to crowdfund on platforms like Republic, which is democratizing and digitizing startup investing.
“It will allow participation from the community,” he said.
Innovation Outlook: Austin declared that, "2022 is a watershed year for us." He said Helios is filling a gap, allowing end-users better, more advanced information to trade on.
The focus, up until now, was to commercialize a new technology – tonal analytics. In going downstream, Helios sees an opportunity to scale its product to the retail market.
“Retail has a big voice, now, and are engaged more than ever. We know it needs to go there, and we know that retail is listening,” Austin said. He notes that retail investors are rewarding companies that are more open and transparent.
In the end, without tonal analytics, Austin explains that investors won’t have the full picture, and maybe left behind. “If you’re not taking tone into account, you’re essentially a mono listener.”
