TruFactor Aims to Capture Buy-Side Clients

TruFactor, a data company owned by InMobi Group and which launched in early 2019, is looking to become an alternative data provider to the buy side.

The vendor originally specialized in urban planning and ad targeting for telco companies, but it started developing relationships with asset managers, discretionary shops, and hedge funds about a year ago. Vivek Iyer, vice president of strategic partnerships, says the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has only heightened interest from those parties.

TruFactor’s main project targeting the financial industry is its Share Shift package, which tracks the performance of companies that do business both in-store and online, and maps the impact the health crisis has on both these areas by tracking metrics like visits to both mediums, app installs and uninstalls, and competitor data. The dataset is in public beta, Iyer says, and is undergoing evaluation by a handful of customers. Out of 3,000 company tickers tracked as part of the service, only some are currently available. Over the next few weeks, however, the company plans to make it available for as many of those as possible.

The company is also introducing a second, more niche package that covers purely online services and applications such as the Zoom video conferencing service and Microsoft Teams collaboration tool, which have seen huge usage spikes since governments shut down non-essential businesses in March, forcing many employees to conduct work and regulation communications virtually. TruFactor analyzes the amount of web activity on such platforms and correlates it to stock prices. As the Covid-19 pandemic begins to recede, the company intends to use that information to monitor activity and performance levels pre- and post-crisis, and compile a sort of index.

The data underlying the TruFactor’s offerings comprise a confluence of anonymized location and web data, gleaned from 30 million US-based customers of telco provider Sprint, following inMobi’s acquisition of Pinsight Media, formerly owned by the mobile carrier. That represents about half of Sprint’s US base. As a subsidiary of InMobi, TruFactor also has access to other datasets owned by its parent company, which collects consented user information from 30,000 apps, globally—examples are mobile games or news apps that aren’t mainly funded through subscription packages—through a software development kit (SDK) to better target advertisements on those applications.

Iyer says TruFactor expects to close its first deals with quant and discretionary funds “very soon.”

The company’s foray into alternative data for the financial world comes at an interesting time. On one hand, the marketplace is already crowded and participants struggle to stand out. In March, WatersTechnology spoke with end-users and startups, and they stressed that the pandemic’s havoc would likely not spare the alt data market, as it has decimated workforces in other industries. On the other hand, alt data is uniquely positioned to help firms make sound investment decisions as conditions rapidly change. It has helped the likes of Lazard Asset Management, Infusive Asset Management, Morgan Stanley and others to spotlight recoveries in certain sectors and geographies, determine portfolio and stock positions, and even decide when and if to let their own employees return to their offices.

Iyer says TruFactor can present another good value proposition to buy-side firms. “The unique thing over here is that for the same user we have both the web as well as the physical data,” he says, emphasizing that the company’s data covers “phygital” behavior, which is meant to account for the fact that most businesses and consumers have a presence both physically and digitally, and behaviors in either medium are not independent of the other.

“You can now actually see the behavior January to March—just pre-Covid—and March onward, in terms of how there’s been a huge shift. Are [shoppers] going back to those stores? And if not, how are they doing their shopping? Are they using Instacart? Because for the same user, we know their Instacart data as well,” Iyer says. “Are they going to Amazon.com, or are they going to Walmart.com? Is Walmart losing users in their stores, but gaining [them] on their website?”