State Street Amps Up Its Media Intelligence Tools: Tech Roundup

State Street Corp. has launched State Street MediaStats Central Bank Indicators and State Street MediaStats Thematic Indicators, two new quantitative investment insights derived from digital media.

The new indicators “collect unstructured data from tens of thousands of curated media sources to quantify market behavior with respect to price and risk across interest rate yields and foreign exchange,” the firm says.

They will help investors “generate timely insights” based on the tone of global central banks and broad market narratives, according to State Street.

State Street MediaStats’ full range of indicators now includes:

• Central Bank Indicators that gauge the degree of hawkishness in the monetary tones of 12 global central banks.
• Thematic Indicators that track 76 overall broad market narratives.
• FX and Country Equity Media Indicators that use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze large sets of unstructured media data, comprising international and domestic media, social media, business news and trading media.
• Macro Linkages Indicators that track inter-asset connectedness among country equity markets and currencies.
• Company Media Indicators that provide insights into company dynamics using proprietary algorithms to measure the abnormal intensity, conditional sentiment and disagreement in media coverage of approximately 3,000 U.S. listed individual companies.
• Media Indicators that generate measures of the abnormal intensity, conditional sentiment and disagreement in media coverage of U.S. sectors, industry groups and industries.
• Linkages Indicators that gauge the strength and impact of inter-company relationships based on company co-mentions in media for about 500 U.S. listed large cap companies.
• Aggregate Linkages Indicators that track the dynamic relationships between sectors, industry groups and industries based on constituent company co-mentions in media coverage.
• Earnings Prediction Technology, or EPTech, which analyzes large sets of consumer data to gauge patterns of digital consumption for about 350 large U.S. listed firms.

Copytalk Releases New Reg BI Solution

Copytalk has expanded its secure dictation solution to better serve enterprises’ Reg BI compliance needs with a Reg BI Dictation Template that it says helps advisors efficiently and accurately document that disclosures were made and that they are acting in a client’s best interests.

To use the new solution, the user first needs to instruct the operator to “make this a Reg BI template, make each question bold and your responses to the question in regular text, and after each answer skip a line and start a new paragraph.”

In the second phase of the offering, which Copytalk is working on developing, the process will be made even easier by automatically putting the dictation in the template, it says.

The Reg BI Template is included in regular Copytalk subscriptions. Enterprise users also have the option of restructuring the template to better fit their needs.

Voya Launches New Budgeting Tool

Voya Financial has rolled out a new online, interactive budgeting calculator that it says is designed to help individuals create a monthly budget for spending and saving, including emergency funds.

The tool “builds on the company’s resources that support the financial wellness needs” of Americans, and also includes: a new Spanish-language experience, the Voya Learn digital educational platform; Voya’s financial wellness experience; and the myOrangeMoney retirement income calculator.

Separately, Voya has acquired the technology and hired the founding team of G Squared Capital, a London-based investment manager that serves institutions and other investors.

Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed, but the firm says the price is “not material to Voya’s financial position.”

G2 is a specialist in applying machine intelligence to fundamental investing, and its proprietary technology is built to identify persistent patterns in company data.

As a result of this transaction, G2 principals Dr. Gareth Shepherd, Gabriel Andraos and Yana Kramer are forming the new Equity Machine Intelligence group within Voya IM’s Quantitative Equities business. Based in London, they will report to Vincent Costa, head of Quantitative Equity for Voya IM.