'Window Into The Mind': How Helios Separates Tone From Voice In Earnings Calls

Benzinga will be holding its annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, a day of dealmaking, networking, and recognition in the financial technology space, on Nov. 10, 2020.

In recognition of those disruptive innovators creating positive and diverse change within the financial services space, Benzinga chatted with Sean Austin, COO at Helios Life Enterprises.

About Helios

Earnings Calls are incredibly important because they provide shareholders and analysts with context surrounding a company’s prospects.

The problem with earnings calls: it’s easy to conceal the subconscious.

Founded in 2017, Helios is a fintech specializing in alpha generation insights derived from human language and emotion. The company is a pioneer in voice analysis for systematic investment, unlocking access to tools sought by government intelligence agencies and large investment entities.

In the simplest way possible: Helios is an audio research analytics platform that provides access to text-based sentiment from earnings calls, across thousands of equities.

“We have a real-time API that allows the ability to pull out predictive audio features,” said Austin. “We do all the work in our cloud-based A.I. engine. We extract all the information and boil it into the important pieces that we’ve done validation, simulations, testing, and customer pilots on.”

Core Product Portfolio

“You don’t need to be an audio engineer.”

Helios comes as a holistic, easy-to-use solution, allowing quantitative researchers and traders the ability to derive alpha from audio signals across 3,500 U.S.-based equities.

The company’s core product portfolio consists of the following main products:

• Comprehend Tier 1: A data product for quantitative traders and researchers generated from audio itself.
• Comprehend Tier 2: A quantamental product consisting of predictive values across the most valuable in-house machine learning models.

“We talk about things like deception and confidence, which is sort of an inverse,” Austin noted. “We try to bridge the gap between audio signal processing experts and portfolio quant traders.”

Recent Developments

“2020 is definitely a year of distress and volatility,” the COO said. “We looked at how we can build a higher order derivative on top of our raw features and [package] it as a more affordable product.”

In light of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the digital transformation accelerated the company’s product timeline.

As a result, Helios worked closely with large wealth managers and investors to hone in on use cases and develop a platform as a service distress feed.

“The distress concept is a much more affordable product. We’re in a very early stage alpha consideration of how we could build these use cases and offer it to say a Barclays to audio search compliance calls for deception,” Austin said.

“COVID accelerated our thinking and gave us a chance to sort of take a breath and get a product out there that is 1/10th the cost, that lets people access the information in voice like one else can.”

Innovation Outlook

“We’re growing and the future is extremely bright.”

Helios plans to hone in on the market’s desire for a low-cost distress-focused solution, without taking the focus off of the company’s flagship quant product.

“We want to make a huge impact and really change how markets can operate,” Austin said. “If Helios has the fingerprint of 128 different core attributes of voice, and we have a database of information behind it, we can have the machine know hyper-specific characteristics of voice.”

To learn more about Helios, click here.

Courtesy Photo.