Accessing the most accurate, up-to-date financial data is a challenge for financial professionals as well as average investors and consumers. With Denoti, Canadian fintech RateSeer has introduced a solution that helps corporate clients, smaller financial institutions, and independent investors get the market and financial data they need in order to execute their business strategies or make investment decisions.
“Our dashboards are suitable for insurance companies, banks, wealth management firms, and all kinds of financial institutions,” RateSeer CEO Donna Tilden explained from the Finovate stage during FinovateFall this September. Along with Head of Business Development Brian Smith, Tilden showed an example of a custom dashboard designed to help a Canadian bank with its mortgage lending strategy. “Within one glance the client can see the average big bank rate just around 3% and the average high rate around 6%,” Tilden said, “they instantly get a general guideline on where to set their rates.” She compared this to the typical tedious tradition of “a team spending the better part of the morning scouring websites and news feeds looking for information on mortgage rate changes, news, and general information. Now it’s all on the screen.”
RateSeer CEO and founder Donna Tilden demonstrating Denoti at FinovateFall 2017.
Tilden went on to show how the dashboard provided access to real-time information for internal KPIs such as changes in mortgage application queue, average processing times, and/or delinquency rates. At the same time, Denoti monitors external, financial data from the thousands of economic and financial data points gathered via the system’s leveraging of cloud computing and powerful algorithms. This enables the platform to note changes in market rates, commodity, bond, and currency prices, and economic indicators in dozens of countries. When there is a match between a financial or economic event and a client’s pre-set rules, Denoti sends a notification of the event via a customized e-mail. “Denoti notifications are qualitative, not quantitative,” Tilden pointed out. “You only get one when the event that you defined occurs. This allows you to be freed up from your desk, yet your business objectives are being achieved,” she said.
Denoti provides custom dashboards that include custom news feeds, with machine learning, predictive analysis, and also market sentiment ratings and trends.
Denoti also provides economic and financial news, curated by machine learning technology so that the information delivered to the client is increasingly relevant over time. Market sentiment ratings and predictive analysis are also available to provide clients with greater insight into their industry. “In one view the client sees what’s going on internally and externally with sources of data coming from all over,” Tilden said. “It allows increased information sharing throughout the organization and increased collaboration.”
Company facts
- Founded in 2015
- Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada
- On track to have 2,000+ Denoti accounts by end of year
- Denoti is available on desktop, as well as on both iOS and Android
We spoke with RateSeer founder and CEO Donna Tilden at FinovateFall 2017 and followed up with a few questions by e-mail. Below are our questions and her responses.
Finovate: What problem does your technology solve?
Donna Tilden: Financial professionals are challenged to identify and exploit reliable, early internal and external information from huge flows of data but face access issues. Constant new sources of data make the goal of consolidation almost impossible. Many lack the efficient tools required to deal with the sheer volume of data. Consider the amount of information that financial professionals must ingest on a daily basis, the number of sources they scour, the amount of time wasted searching for the right information. We live in a data-driven world and although more is created every day, often corporations do not have the focused data they require to make informed and timely financial decisions. Denoti technology optimizes the way businesses capture, integrate, visualize and notify executives, employees and customers of changes to mission-critical information. We offer dashboards and custom notifications for thousands of market rates.
Finovate: Who are your primary customers?
Tilden: Personal and/or corporate investors, wealth managers and private client groups, loan servicing departments, mortgage professionals, traders, financial advisors, and financial planners.
Finovate: How does Denoti solve the problem better?
Tilden: Denoti technology is low-cost, simplified, and streamlined. Denoti removes the unnecessary noise from market news and provides a way to access and visually focus on the data that is vital to business strategy.
Denoti’s dashboards are suitable for insurance companies, banks, wealth managements firms, and other financial institutions.
Finovate: What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?
Tilden: I am a professional accountant with decades of professional experience in the financial services industry. While working for a large multinational I witnessed departmental data turf wars, data siloes, an inability to access multiple databases, and the unfortunate burden and cost of working with legacy systems. I witnessed hours of wasted time and energy. Business decisions were based on estimates and historical information. Colleagues would sit at super expensive terminals watching and waiting. You cannot succeed today in that environment. Businesses must have access to real-time data; it is the way the industry and really the world have evolved. Denoti technology solves these problems and is an absolute necessity.
Finovate: What are some upcoming initiatives from your company that we can look forward to over the next few months?
Tilden: Given the sheer volume of useful financial data that we currently aggregate and house, we are in the process of adding APIs. We want to make it easy for our partners and really, any company, to make use of the data we collect in their own applications.
Finovate: Where do you see Denoti a year or two from now?
Tilden: We are currently working on several pilot projects and are looking forward to the insights that will result. With the addition of predictive analysis, and APIs to denoti.com within the next few months, our SaaS and DaaS customer base will have grown exponentially, as will our team. Denoti is already expanding our partnerships to include companies based in Europe and Asia-Pacific. The implementation of a few technical enhancements for self-serve and customization over the next year will solidify our position and market reach. RateSeer will continue to successfully respond to the emerging trends in fintech and big data, including blockchain technology.
Brian Smith, Head of Business Development