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The company
Renaissance Macro (RenMac) helps clients view the world through a differentiated lens not readily available from traditional investment houses. RenMac’s founding partners left larger bulge-brackets to focus on building a world-class database (stretching back to the 1920s) and expanded their analyses to provide some of the deepest, most original, and thoroughly vetted research on the street. Howard Mason is the Financials Analyst at RenMac, covering the evolving payments ecosystem from a company and macro level, and views the landscape through a thematic long-term investment horizon.
The challenge
As the payments process has evolved over the years, so too, has the need for in-depth analysis of the entire payments ecosystem, from banks to the rails and beyond. Howard covers the evolving ‘sector’ and his deep dive research requires him to stay on top of the latest trends and evolving topics. Describing the process of sifting through dozens of company filings and transcripts as “onerous”, Howard was seeking an easier way to pinpoint the insights critical to his research.
“The ease of use is what keeps me coming back. I’m also an advocate for the platform – when a client doesn’t use it already, I suggest they do.”
Howard Mason, Payments Analyst
Results
Automated process: Before AlphaSense, Howard described the research process as “onerous.” He would acquire a PDF of a transcript or company filing on a company’s website, download it, and then CTRL+F his way through the dense documents to identify snippets of information that he could use in his research. Rinse and repeat for dozens of documents to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the companies he covers are talking about a particular topic. The problem? Fear of missing information and an incredibly time-consuming and error-prone research process.
“The beauty of AlphaSense is that it automates that process. You can search across a variety of sources in parallel and then the AI will surface the best matches based on your search query” Howard shares. He likens the way in which AlphaSense automates his equity research process to how Google automated the process of going to the library. “What did you do before Google? You went to the library.” With AlphaSense, Howard can surface what every bank is saying about digital currencies, in seconds and feel confident that AI has captured the most relevant sources.
Ease of use: As a sell-side expert, his principal use case is in leveraging the platform to search across company documents to understand what companies are saying about major themes in the payments space. “Finding what I need is simple in AlphaSense” says Howard, and when you’re consuming information hidden within thousands of documents, simplicity translates into major time savings.
A long-time AlphaSense user, we asked what keeps Howard renewing his contract each year. “The ease of use is what keeps me coming back. I’m also an advocate for the platform – when a client doesn’t use it already, I suggest they do.” For Howard, AlphaSense has become the “Google for company and financial documents”, a critical tool that helps him to simplify.