Summer is my favourite season. Not only because of the sunny weather and the relaxed mood, but especially because you have time to devote to proper research and development, given that the rest the world is on holiday. Our team has been working tirelessly to release new and exciting developments to Datamaran - with a particular focus on online news and social media.
Before going further, a quick recap for our new readers - welcome! Datamaran is a cloud-based analytics platform that scrapes and analyzes large sets of publicly available unstructured data (corporate reports, the regulatory landscape and online news and social media channels). Why? We help companies and investors understand which non-financial topics should be on their radar based on significant trends and patterns we derive from publicly available information. Datamaran categorizes these non-financial topics - ranging from human rights, to board composition, to climate risk to cyber security - into buckets of strategic, regulatory and reputation risks/opportunities.
Why use technology and data science you might ask? Current approaches to the assessment of risk and opportunities identified by non-financial issues are limited by 1. narrow scope (subset/samples of stakeholders); 2. opinion based methodologies (questionnaires/interviews) 3. Static perspective (not capturing trends over time).
One of the core strengths of Datamaran is integrating different sources (i.e. different stakeholder voices) characterized by different language, nature, and time frame to provide the most comprehensive representation of risk and opportunities associated to material issues.
When it comes to news and social media, these sources are volatile and highly reactive to controversies and risk. Interactions between stakeholders and businesses can evolve very rapidly on such platforms, making their continuous analysis key for identifying and monitoring emerging trends concerning non-financial issues over time.
From the words of our CTO, Jerome:
“With the latest enhancements to our platform, we are now providing an unequated analytic platform to perform continuous monitoring of emerging risks and opportunities. We significantly enhanced Newsflow and our Social module in such a way to we can very easily point our listening antennas towards any part of the cyberspace and gather, categorize and priortize the relevant conversations for our clients.”
Datamaran’s enhanced News Module offers a Google-esque search functionality through 100,000s of news articles across 900+ sources - curated especially for ESG experts from both corporate and investor communities.
As a user you can filter news by industry, by portfolio, and more, to see how trends evolve. As a corporate you can look at yourself or your key competitors, or look at NGOs and activist groups. As an investor/analyst you can look at entire portfolios or industries and see which topics are widely debated in the media.
We also gave our Twitter analytics a serious boost. Social media is today’s courtroom of public opinion. This is where reputation of companies and individuals can be assessed in real-time. In terms of our social media analytics, users now have access to non-financial insights into more granular chunks. This allows users to dig deeper; to slice and dice and shed light on who are leading influencers, which are the top tweets, which are the influential accounts and top domains. These metrics are important to assess how issues are developing. Our CEO said:
“It is incredibly exciting to see how technology can help provide evidence-based ammunition as to why non-financial issues matter. With the new social and online news developments Datamaran, we bring non-financial issues in the here and now allowing corporates and investors to get real-time updates and to act immediately. I think our data scientists are brilliant and I’m so lucky to be part of a company that can drive ESG analysis onto the next level.”