Scout Finance Bows Fundamental Research App for Buy Side, Investors

The app allows users to set up a watchlist of companies, then alongside that displays a feed of research documents, filings and company presentations relevant to companies in the list, sourced from Thomson Reuters, Morningstar, and from Scout Finance's own data collection process, where the vendor visits the websites of exchange-listed companies and downloads information using an algorithmic process.

Users can then search and annotate any of the documents, and can cache them to read later, and share them with whoever they want via an email link. The app also records, stores and caches earnings calls so users can listed to those in the background─even without an internet connection, such as on the subway.

"Normally, you would have to go to individual company investor relations sites to get and download filings and presentations. We hope to save users 30 minutes per day, instead of them spending that time trawling websites, printing documents and sending them out," says Scout Finance co-founder and chief executive Vivek Nasta. "If we can take between 30 minutes and two hours out of someone's day─especially around earnings season─we think people will be prepared to pay $200 per month for the convenience."

In the future, Scout Finance may seek to replace some of the data it currently sources from third-party vendors, such as any filings it does not already collect directly, though Nasta says collecting financial data "would need 1,000 people in India," but might be economically feasible in the long term.

"We pull in datasets such as fundamentals and recalculate them into a standardized format and also present them in ‘as-reported' format... and from the quarterly reports that we capture, we can roll those figures up into an ‘annual' figure in one step, rather than having to load it into Excel and roll it up from there," he says.

Scout Finance built the app natively for the Apple iOS operating system without using HTML5, since HTML5 does not support caching, Nasta says. "We thought this was a better way than building a desktop on the web and shrinking it responsively," he says. "We've tried to create a mobile-first product that serves on-the-go investors, such as long-short buy-side professionals who are out at conferences or in meetings."

The vendor does not plan to build an Android app, since officials say the vast majority of users have iOS devices. However, it will roll out a mobile-friendly, responsive next year that can support Android users.

Nasta set up the company early last year before officially launching in the middle of this year, after several months of already coding initial versions of the product. He then assembled a team of former Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg staff, including Ashish Muni, former chief technology officer and global head of mobile technology at Thomson Reuters, and Milan Manavat, a former senior mobile developer at Bloomberg.