I met up with Maribeth Martorana, CEO & Founder of Sapient Advisors, in Bryant Park on a  blue-sky New York City day. 

We started out discussing the merits of NYC wedding venues because we happened to be sitting near the Bryant Park Grill where she celebrated her own nuptials. 

Maribeth and I had parallel careers collecting and structuring financial data for large institutional platforms. She worked at Factset and Moody’s; I was at Bloomberg. We’ve since started our own companies. 

We talked about how alternative data and AI are transforming fintech and opening up new opportunities for data monetization.

If you haven’t come across “alternative data” you will soon enough. It’s non-traditional data collected by companies that is increasingly used for business intelligence.

Alt data can be everything from counting the number of people in an Apple store on the day an iPhone is released to how many cars are in the parking lot of a Chinese factory. It is hard to precisely define, but it’s usually anything that is not standard earnings or government reported data. 

Oftentimes, alt data is the digital exhaust generated in the normal course of doing business. There are lots of companies that spawn data, but most don’t know which numbers are valuable or how to package and sell it.

That’s where Maribeth comes in. There are layers to helping companies monetize their data. The first is identifying which datasets are valuable. They have to be organized and scrubbed and put in formats like APIs for delivery. 

Sapient is focused on helping companies realize those opportunities by identifying valuable data, structuring it and finding a market.

One of the things that makes this world so exciting right now is how AI offers the ability to identify and build valuable datasets at a faster rate and lower cost. And it opens up opportunities for all kinds of new alt data. 

One example that has become commonplace recently is leveraging AI to mine earnings transcripts and other conference calls for insights. AI can detect fluctuations in sentiment among the CEO or other executives, providing insights that previously could only be acquired by having  analysts listen to hours of calls. 

Maribeth can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.