The Company
System1 (NYSE: SST) is an omni-channel customer acquisition marketing platform that helps advertisers reach customers wherever they may be on the Internet. By developing and utilizing advanced data science, AI, and machine learning techniques to optimize user acquisition and monetization, System1 builds powerful brands across multiple consumer verticals and delivers high-intent customers to its advertising partners.
From Quantitative to Qualitative Data Analysis
As the Chief Financial Officer at System1, Tridivesh Kidambi leads all aspects of the company’s Corporate Finance Organization, composed of FP&A, accounting, financial reporting, treasury and investor relations functions. Apart from a focus on informing their internal financial models and projections, the Corporate Finance Organization relies upon analysis of peers’ earnings to inform their own investor messaging, including earnings remarks.
In order to inform a compelling investor narrative and stay on equal footing with the broader analyst community, System1 invested in AlphaSense to seamlessly summarize key industry insights and events in real time. With members of the Corporate Finance team wearing multiple hats in their day-to-day workflows, System1 leverages AlphaSense across their Corporate Finance and IR teams to support a variety of use cases.
As part of a relatively new public company, one of the primary areas of focus for the IR team is analyzing data to help grow System1’s investor base. The team needs to be informed about a broad swatch of themes and players across the online advertising industry, ranging from multi-trillion dollar market capitalization giants like Alphabet and Microsoft, to relatively smaller companies with market capitalizations closer to $1 billion.
Before AlphaSense, they struggled with identifying the full scope of information they should be processing and how best to summarize and disseminate that information in an efficient fashion, according to Kidambi. However, since signing up with AlphaSense, he quickly noticed a significant shift in how the team collects and synthesizes data, primarily regarding supporting investor lead generation.
“Before AlphaSense, we operated in a very ad hoc and responsive manner. Being a public company with a mandate to build an investor base, we needed a scalable process to proactively identify and market to investors potentially aligned with System1’s specific opportunities and competitive advantages. AlphaSense has proven to be the tool that has unlocked our ability to quickly synthesize data to be easily digestible and actionable at a moment’s notice.”
–Tridivesh Kidambi, CFO at System1
Staying One Step Ahead During Earnings Season
AlphaSense has added a layer of efficiency and confidence to the System1 team during earnings season. Before leveraging the platform, the IR team struggled to find the time to join earnings calls for each company on their watch list. They would review notes from analysts produced daily following each call in the hopes that it would summarize the relevant points. In this event, someone on the team would be assigned to find the transcript, read it in full, and summarize the information. This cumbersome process overextended the team’s resources and was an expensive use of resources.
For Kidambi, AlphaSense’s streamlined user interface allows them to get smart, quickly, about what their industry peers were messaging and how that compared to what System1 was seeing in their own data and across the industry. Access to Smart Summaries in AlphaSense provides the team with an “easy way to get those other data points quickly in and around the same time that we’re preparing our remarks,” says Kidambi. Accessing those data points in real time versus waiting for an outsourced resource to provide a summary makes a huge difference during earnings season in terms of cost savings and resource optimization.
“During earnings season, hours matter. Getting a summary of a document or earnings call from AlphaSense at 9:00am versus 5:00pm is a huge deal if I’m reporting the next day.”
Further, Kidambi comments on the value AlphaSense brings in allowing the team to uncover themes woven between the content rather than forcing them to parse through individual documents to create themes on their own. This macro-lense approach to data analysis helps quickly identify what questions investors are asking so they can spend more time discussing those trends to better prepare for their remarks and create a single source of truth.
A Differentiated Pricing Model to Support Differentiated Needs
For Kidambi, the AlphaSense platform provides value outside of core-IR functions. With thematic priorities shifting quarterly, effectively benchmarking across their sector is a team-wide mandate – from IR to corporate comms to financial reporting. AlphaSense made this scaling up easy, with a pricing model that allowed for broader access and cost-savings at the same time.
System1 found the AlphaSense Corporate Finance Package* to be extremely advantageous and cost effective because it met a diverse set of use cases and varying needs across the team while enabling collaboration and parity.
Deliverables such as earnings call summarization and sell side research monitoring were historically provided through an external agency. By arming the broader team with AlphaSense access, System1 improved their speed to information and was able to realize cost-savings in downsizing their agency spend.
Throughout an earnings cycle, teams within a corporate finance organization collaborate closely to ensure an accurate and strategic reporting of results. While working interdependently, they each play a crucial role in preparing, reviewing, and communicating the company’s performance. Coordination – further enabled via team-wide access to the AlphaSense platform – is essential in ensuring effective communication with stakeholders
The Future of Confident Decision-Making With AlphaSense
Kidambi and his organization are looking forward to supporting System1 as the company continues to grow its market footprint as a public company. Within an uncertain interest rate environment and an increased focus on profitability, being able to benchmark effectively is a priority now more than ever. The team plans to explore how they can better leverage AlphaSense to support their benchmarking efforts rather than relying on third parties.
As a CFO, Kidambi’s underlying motivation is to empower the Corporate Finance and Investor Relations teams at System1 to be effective communicators and partners in helping grow the business. Having a tool like AlphaSense not only allows him to refocus his time on business growth strategizing but also gives him the confidence to know that the breadth of information he receives from AlphaSense’s content database inspires faster, smarter decisions.
“When you just get started being a public company, you always want to feel like you’re prepared and never taken by surprise. Just the confidence to know I either have the information or can get it very quickly for around 80% of the questions I get asked both internally and externally has been super helpful.”
*To learn more about the AlphaSense Corporate Finance Package, please click here.
