Chicago-based NLP tool provider, GreenKey Technologies (GK), recently won the Most Cutting Edge Workflow award for their GK Research Bot in Symphony’s New York Hackathon.
GreenKey’s Recent Hackathon Win
The business problem that the GK Research Bot addressed in Symphony’s New York Hackathon is the need of many sell-side research teams for better engagement with their buy-side clients, and the fact that buy-side research teams do not have sufficient time to read and analyze all the research they want to.
Built using GreenKey’s proprietary software development kit and the Symphony chat platform, GK Research Bot allows users to drag and drop research related documents, like a sell-side research report or an earnings call transcript, into the Symphony chat window. The text gets processed by GreenKey’s NLP technology; extracts pre-set, user-defined terms and key performance indicators (KPIs); performs sentiment analysis to realize the speaker’s intent; and generates a structured, searchable summary for the researcher.
GreenKey’s CTO Tom Schady explained their participation in this year’s hackathon, saying “Overwhelming financial data results in missed opportunities for the trading desk, as well as research professionals. GK NLP is the optimal solution to make sense of these unstructured data and allow you to focus on higher level thinking. Symphony is the ideal interface for all of this – right at your fingertips with a natural language query, you get 24/7 access to the entire suite of GK NLP solutions.”
Schady acknowledged that GreenKey is thinking about commercializing the GK Research Bot, though he noted some tweaks are likely before an official rollout. “There’s a big difference between the quality that we would build in eight hours versus something we productize for a bank. And so hackathons are a great discovery tool,” Schady says. “We’re talking to our customers now to validate this idea before spending any significant time building it.”
GreenKey’s New York Symphony hackathon submission won as the Most Cutting Edge Workflow. The other two categories available included Most Impactful Business Automation and Best “Work-from-Home” Workflow. As winners of a Symphony Hackathon, GreenKey will compete in Symphony’s Hackathon Olympics later in 2021.
Our Take
GreenKey’s recent Symphony hackacthon win is the first award the Chicago-based NLP provider has received for extending its technology into the investment research space. As we mentioned in October of last year, GreenKey recently launched its Focus Studio NLP platform to help buy-side clients more efficiently consume unstructured content like news, research, earnings reports and other related articles as part of their research process.
It is interesting to note that GreenKey’s GK Research Bot is not the first time that Symphony has been involved with a similar use case. In October 2020, Morgan Stanley announced that it had launched its proprietary AskResearch bot to enable institutional salespeople and eventually buy-side clients to more efficiently engage with their research. Morgan Stanley partnered with Symphony to build and train this application over two and a half years.
Late last year, GreenKey also launched its base financial sentiment model on AWS Marketplace, enabling users to easily extract sentiment across a wide range of unstructured textual content. It will be interesting to watch as GreenKey expands its product offering into the highly competitive space for NLP-based research tools.