Enhancements include alerts to SEC filing changes; new data comparison tools.
NEW YORK, April 5, 2016 — Leading semantic data analysis provider Recognos Financial today announced a new release of its Reference Data Center (RDC) for Mutual Funds. Enhancements to the platform include immediate alerts to changes filed by funds in SEC documents and a new tool for data comparison among fund groups, intermediaries and competitors.
“By employing our advanced machine learning and natural language processing techniques to extracting data from SEC filings, Recognos Financial is unlocking additional analytical value for investors, asset managers and mutual fund providers on a timely basis,” said Drew Warren, President and CEO, Recognos Financial.
The RDC is an industry utility created by Recognos Financial to provide participants and their clients with all the mutual fund information necessary to support their businesses from start to finish. The RDC acts not only as a central repository for documents relating to all U.S. based open-ended mutual funds, but transforms the unstructured data from this documents into actionable and verifiable insight using Recognos Financial’s proprietary semantic technology.
The first enhancement announced today is an alert system to any changes initiated by a fund company and filed in a new SEC document that might impact the company or its trading partners. Changes to a fund’s prospectus, statement of additional information (SAI), or filed in a separate supplement are captured nightly for all open end mutual fund companies. Subscribers to the Recognos RDC can select which funds information they might want along with the specific types of data within a filing that would be of interest. Email notifications will be received by the user that will include the highlighted fields being affected along with the actual SEC filed document.
The second new feature allows fund groups or intermediaries to review and compare their data against industry data or versus select competitors down to a particular share class or CUSIP level. Charts, graphs and the ability to download any data points into an Excel format are also available.
In addition to helping users meet compliance obligations by providing access to more accurate information, the RDC provides instant verification of data points by highlighting their source within the body of the original documentation right within the portal. It enables mutual fund providers to extract competitive insights from the documentation, with users able to quickly and easily perform competitive analysis and take advantage of inbuilt competitor monitoring tools, and provides customizable alerts for amendments filed with the SEC. The RDC utilizes a combination of machine learning, natural language processing and semantic technologies to aggregate and transform key data points automatically from mutual fund disclosure documentation, including prospectus summaries, shareholder reports and risk/return summaries. The resulting data and associated documents are then made available not only as text documents, but as customized data feeds direct to the data consumer.
Access to the RDC for Fund Families and Intermediaries is available by subscription.