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Consider this.
Every quarter, private market investors receive an organizational update from their asset managers, details about their committed capital, and an investment schedule that provides thorough information on portfolio holdings, transactions, and financials. These quarterly packages often lack standardization, making it cumbersome and time-consuming to extract actionable data.
At BlackRock, we developed proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology designed for private markets reporting—now available via eFront Insight.
Extract meaning each quarter. Scale up throughout the year. Expand beyond the core.
Deploying this technology allows for seamless application across contexts, asset classes, and different types of documents (from investment schedules to capital account statements).
Over the course of a year, an asset manager evaluates thousands of potential deals, while just a fraction ultimately lead to investment within a fund. Uncovering the fundamental value of these assessments requires processing a massive amount of commercial and legal documents, not to mention other (often unstructured) sources of information like social media sentiment and content from external sources—all with an aim to analyze the mood around targeted deals.
> Read how BlackRock engineers gave NLP a human touch
Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods can unlock tremendous value for any business facing sizeable volumes of data processing. These methods are capable of processing tens of thousands of reports and PDFs.
But the benefit has not been without its costs: teams of analysts manually training models, untransferable and unscalable niche solutions, and software that can read text but has trouble finding meaning amid tables and graphs—are all downsides to non-industry specific technologies.
We’ve pioneered a revolutionary solution: a model that interprets more like a human than a machine (with an eye geared towards financial documents).
This model brings new potential to the world of unstructured financial data.
BlackRock’s NLP technology is already incorporated within eFront Insight—an analytical platform for private markets that offers performance and investment monitoring tools for asset allocators and asset managers. This data extraction technology complements eFront’s automated document capture and categorization, as well as over 1,000 automation validation rules facilitating human-in-the-loop, end-to-end delivery to investors.
It’s the next step in eFront’s journey towards bringing automation and transparency to the private markets, and includes: