Who will be the next Apple? What company with what disruptive idea will turn the world of technology upside down? For this series, Benzinga interviewed CEOs of several technology startups that are making waves today in the hopes of making a difference tomorrow.
SEIN Analytics founder and CEO Samuel Belu-John told Benzinga his company’s primary goal was to make expensive, critical financial data and analysis available to small and mid-sized financial institutions.
“When we started this back in 2012, we soon realized this was a huge amount of data,” Belu-John said.
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Helping The Little Guy
According to Belu-John, much larger competitors such as 1010data and Corelogic, Inc. CLGX charge a premium for this data because they are hosting and reshipping it on hard disks.
“We wanted to make the same data available to smaller to mid-sized investors,” he explained. “So we built a cloud infrastructure to avoid the need to send out large expensive servers with the data included.”
Flexibility
The cloud infrastructure, Belu-John noted, would allow SEIN Analytics the flexibility to ship the platform with the data for some customers, but also make it possible for smaller institutions to utilize a Web-based application.
To create even more flexibility, he said, “We have designed the user interface so you could potentially manipulate the data from a tablet.”
Attention To Detail
According to Belu-John, flexibility and economies of scale do not translate into “difficult to use.”
“We spent two years just on the infrastructure,” he stated. “We brought in a company called Zend Technologies to help create the architecture.”
The net result, he said, was that, “When a user fires up the server there is no consideration on their side. They don’t have to load any software, operating system or database – that’s all done dynamically.”
"If You Build It …"
Although technically SEIN Analytics would likely be considered still to be in beta, Belu-John said something interesting happened recently.
“It’s one of those ‘If you build it they will come’ sort of stories,” he said. “Our goal was to have the data completely seated and ready for launch by the end of this month (March)."
“While we were seating the data we started to notice there were some transactions we already had all the data for where the owner of the equity piece was sitting on value and we could help them.”
Value Of Data
The net result was that Belu-John and the SEIN Analytics team realized the bulk of the value was in the data.
One cold-call to the equity owner, and suddenly SEIN became, as Belu-John said, “our own first customer.”
He added, “Because our data is so vast we could look at potentially doing maybe 10 to 15 more of these transactions.”
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Full Launch Coming Soon
“We are trying to be able to launch a full data product by mid-May to early June,” Belu-John explained.
“We will not be covering the entire space initially...We’ll probably only cover 25 percent of the market at that point.”
SEIN Analytics is a finalist in Benzinga's upcoming FinTech Awards in New York, April 8.
At the time of writing, Jim Probasco had no position in any mentioned securities.
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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