Joining Melody on today’s episode is Elizabeth Pritchard, recently named CEO of Bitvore - the leader in AI-driven intelligence from unstructured data. Elizabeth begins by sharing her journey into the STEM and finance industries, her 19-year tenure at Goldman Sachs, and the evolution of alternative data in the financial industry. She goes on to explain what alternative and unstructured data are, the challenges of extracting information from it and leveraging AI and the structured data it creates. 

Elizabeth illustrates how traditional and alternative data can offer differ perspectives on a company, for example they may claim to be green, but ESG data shows that they are actually heavy emitters. These insights can help investors gain a more nuanced view of companies and help combat ‘greenwashing.’ The conversation concludes with her passionate advocacy work empowering young people, especially girls, to pursue STEM, and offers her vision of the world in the year 2041. Brimming with knowledge, wisdom, and enthusiasm, Elizabeth Pritchard is a well-known serial innovator, data activist, and analytics-driven executive, and, as you will hear today, a gifted educator and agent of change as well. 

Elizabeth Pritchard has 25 years of experience as an executive in financial services, driving data and technology innovation for financial institutions and start-ups. She was Global Head of Market Data at Goldman Sachs and COO of the Global Data Science Group at AIG, co-founded Crux Informatics, where she was Head of Go-To-Market Strategy.  Just prior to accepting the CEO position at Bitvore, provided advisory services to alternative data and data infrastructure providers through her own company, White Rock Data Solutions. Elizabeth also advises industry professional associations SIIA and FISD Alternative Data Council on go-to-market strategy, and serves on the Board of Directors at Eagle Alpha and Global Data. 

Episode Highlights:

·   Elizabeth’s journey into STEM and finance

·   Her time at Goldman Sachs and the evolution she saw in the financial industry from a data driven innovation and AI perspective

·   Examples where traditional and alternative data offered differing views

·   Unstructured data and the challenges in extracting information out of it

·   Leveraging AI and the structured data it creates

·   What attracted Elizabeth to Bitvore and the initiatives there about which she is most excited

·   How Bitvore is bringing insights from ESG data to battle company ‘greenwashing’

·   Elizabeth’s advocacy with Girls Who Code and STEM++Inno

Soundbites from the Expert:

Elizabeth’s journey into STEM and finance

2:05   “I was really born with this innovator bug.”

2:43   “’Listen, when you come here in the morning, you've got to put on your thick skin.’ That is

 the lesson…and that's wisdom that has really resonated, if you will, throughout my career.”

3:28   “I learned very much so to focus on what's really happening, and learn to be data driven,

        and let the data do the talking. And always be fact, based in decision making.”

Her time at Goldman Sachs and the evolution she saw in the financial industry from a data driven innovation and AI perspective

6:37   “That whole discovery, if you will, of this world of data that can describe not only

companies actually, but also how economies are performing…being able to mine the 

data in the world that's being made available in an ever increasing rate - that was the

beginning of an amazing, very interesting journey.”

Examples where traditional and alternative data offered differing views

9:48   “It was a part of, the new part of, the risk evaluation of a company that without AI and

unstructured data, they were not able to easily come up with this insight.”

11:45 “Those claims that companies are making are now subject to much more scrutiny in the

  world, because of the more advanced capabilities of the AI tools that are available to

  scour, you know, huge amounts of information really quickly.”

Unstructured data and the challenges in extracting information out of it

14:13 “This whole corpus of data, unstructured data, has been growing dramatically, 

 especially, as you can imagine, with mobile, with cloud, with all of these new sources of

 blogging and Twitter and Facebook and, you know, multiple sources, the whole internet

 with the growth of the internet, multiple massive sources of unstructured data.”

15:44 “The challenge is, if you're interested in company performance, you need to be able to

 extract out the named entities you care about.”

18:19 “What you're really doing right is extracting out information and creating a clean

  structured data set, which you can then, AI ready, bring into machine learning models,

or, you know, other data analysis, to shed more light on that particular company and that particular event.”

Leveraging AI and the structured data it creates

19:21 “We approach it with multiple models. So it's what's the best model for the task.”

21:07 “Creating a clean data set requires multiple models. And then, well, what does the next

 research report say? Keeping that fresh on an ongoing basis is another challenge.”

What attracted Elizabeth to Bitvore and the initiatives there about which she is most excited

22:25 “I started White Rock Data Solutions, my consulting firm…right before COVID, and my

 very first client was Bitvore.”

21:13 “I really liked the team. I really liked the technology. You know, I love the extracting

  valuable insights from unstructured data, the market demand, the market forces all

  seemed very positive to me. So I took the plunge.”

24:50 “We have been really honing our third party risk intelligence.”

25:33 “We have the precision and recall…leading edge metrics and accomplishment in the

  world for mining intelligence about public and private companies from unstructured

  data.”

26:35 “We come in…surveilling the world, scouring the world, for the performance of 

 companies in these key areas, business events, ESG events, and then providing that to

 Wall Street, but also providing it to companies so they know what Wall Street is looking

 at about their company.”

How Bitvore is bringing insights from ESG data to battle company ‘greenwashing’

29:40 “In this case of net zero, we're looking for, you know, GHG emissions, we're looking for

  air quality, we're looking for different kinds of flood risk. We're looking for all different

  kinds of, I'm going to say attributes or events, topics, that impact the environment and

 then we look at that and we look at, ‘Is it in favorable light or not?’”

30:52 “We like to call it ‘AI ready data’, so that we don't compete with their specific secret

 sauce, we fuel their secret sauce, we fuel their models with our intelligence.”

The assessments that Bitvore provides to clients

32:38 “We provide a score, we also provide an abstract, and we also provide the full article…the

  headline’s there, the abstract’s there, the full article’s there.”

32:58 “We think it's really important to be transparent.”

33:44 “We're augmenting the intelligence, and we're also making it much more efficient.”

Elizabeth’s advocacy to empower young people, especially girls, to pursue STEM, technology, and innovation

35:51 “What really opened my eyes was Girls Who Code and the work they had done to

 understand how much of a gap there was, and the mission they were on, to educate, I

 think, was a million girls in five years.”

36:43 “When I saw lives changed, that really solidified like I got, I got to keep staying involved

  here, I really have to continue to advocate for women and women in STEM, of course,

  you know, promotion opportunities, leadership opportunities for women, but also to

  bring stem to younger girls, even even before High School, to middle school students.”

38:42 “I find that the best solutions, the best ideas, the best productivity comes from diverse

 thinking, and bringing that in together, you come up with much better solutions.”

39:05 “I think that leaders today, certainly with what's been happening over the last year or two

 leaders today are much more understanding that a diverse leadership team is just 

 essential.”

Elizabeth’s vision of the world in 2041

40:04 “I think it would be, you know, 1984, with a new cover.”

40:53 “I do think that the counterbalance of ethical AI and explainable AI and, you know,

 ensuring we do the right thing for mankind will ensure that, you know, as a world we do

 the right thing.”

Links:

Absolute AI Homepage

Innodata

Bitvore Homepage

White Rock Data Solutions