Author Cory Sarver | Chief Editor, CityFALCON
We are CityFALCON, a fintech that leverages natural language understanding (NLU), AI, and Big Data to curate financial content and generates analytics. Our mission is to democratise access to financial content around the world, and we already count 23 languages for our advanced NLU and coverage of over 100 countries. We have a team of almost 40 with offices in Malta, London, and Ukraine. Malta hosts the entire C-suite.
BNP Paribas, IEX Group, Seedrs, a $1 trillion asset manager, and several SMEs and other fintechs trust our solutions. Throughout our history, we’ve won awards and recognition from Twitter, Standard Bank, Seedrs, NTT Data, and others. So far we’ve raised £3m in funding, and we conduct lean operations.
In 2014, Ruzbeh Bacha started the company by programming a simple dashboard in his bedroom to trade the markets. Today, we curate news, filings, Reddit and Twitter posts, investor relations content, prices, and more. Then we add structure, extract important content, and generate analytics including sentiment, similarity, and relevance scores plus summaries. This is all delivered via API, web, mobile, and voice applications.
The incumbent players in the space are far too expensive for the average retail trader/investor and many SMEs, while we charge far less. Our approach towards automation – include it as much as possible – keeps the costs low for users. Conversely, unlike the free services offered by Yahoo Finance and Google, we don’t invade your privacy. We promote the subscription model to fund growth rather than sell your data.
In Malta, we opened our third office in 2019 with the assistance of Malta Enterprise, including grants for Business Development and Research and Development. The latter grant is connected to a collaborative project with the University of Malta, wherein our teams investigate transfer learning to rapidly expand our coverage to over 100 languages with minimal labour. This is another example of our leveraging of automation.
Our vision is to democratise access to financial content for retail market participants, SMEs, governments, academia, and even large corporations, where departments may share a single terminal to reduce costs. With our licensing model and the availability of a GUI-based website or an API, it becomes affordable for everyone in a department to have an account or access to data without the immense costs.
We have raised £3m to date and built an entire taxonomy, collected and curated terabytes of financial content, and augmented NLU models specifically for finance/business. We’ve also added years of value to NLU models for sentiment and our other analytics. We do intend to raise £2m in 2021 to catapult us into the high-growth stage.