Top Questions: BattleFin AI and Alt Data Discovery Day New York, Oct 2025
Conference Preview: Questions for speakers at BattleFin’s Discovery Day in New York on October 9, 2025.
Data conference season continues, with BattleFin’s AI and Alt Data conference in New York on October 9th.
Agenda: https://www.battlefin.com/newyork-oct25
To help the data community prepare, I’ve created targeted questions for each speaker and panel. There are 3 key themes to my questions:
Translating Alternative Data into Investment Decisions
AI and Automation in Data Processing
Data Reliability, Evaluation, and Trust
Welcome to the Data Score newsletter, composed by DataChorus LLC. This newsletter is your source for insights into data-driven decision-making. Whether you’re an insight seeker, a unique data company, a software-as-a-service provider, or an investor, this newsletter is for you. I’m Jason DeRise, a seasoned expert in the field of data-driven insights. I was at the forefront of pioneering new ways to generate actionable insights from alternative data. Before that, I successfully built a sell-side equity research franchise based on proprietary data and non-consensus insights. I remain active in the intersection of data, technology, and financial insights. Through my extensive experience as a purchaser and creator of data, I have a unique perspective, which I am sharing through the newsletter.
Note: Agenda as of October 6th, 2025
8:45 AM What to expect for Christmas Selling season—Consumer & Supply Chain Data Mosaic
Using Alt Data to Navigate Holiday 2025 Season: early indications from the supply chain, transaction and other categories
Tracking the shifts in consumer behavior and which companies will come out ahead
Going below the surface to show how Mapping SKU-level data can be more accurate and identify trends earlier
• Dorothy Ruderman—Data Strategy & Research, Verition Fund Management
• Michael Gunther—VP, Head of Insights, Consumer Edge
• Richard Davenport—Consultant, Dun & Bradstreet
Question: When SKU-level transactions, card data, and private-company supply-chain signals point in different directions for a specific retailer, what is your analytical process to connect the dots to an actionable investment decision?
9:05 AM Turning Alt-Data into Investor-Ready Forecasts
How the Exabel platform takes raw signals to P&L using the new hierarchical modeling feature.
• Gene Gallagher—Director of Research, Exabel
Question: What evaluation suite and backtests do you require before moving a vendor signal into P&L workflows?
9:20 AM Powering the Next Generation of AI and Finance
How to avoid hallucinations, inaccuracies, and the inability to tie outputs back to trusted sources
• Thomas Li—Co-Founder & CEO, Daloopa
• Tim Harrington—CEO & Co-founder, BattleFin
Questions: A first question on the art of the possible: What is the fastest credible time to model you have achieved with Daloopa, from an IPO S-1 to a production-ready Excel model? What failed in earlier attempts? As a second, more technical question: Where do you draw the line between retrieval-augmented generation and deterministic extraction for SEC text to prevent hallucinated metrics in analyst models?
9:40 AM When Signals Converge: Making Sense of Market Noise
Individual data points tell part of the story; integrated signals reveal the whole. Learn how combining market, corporate, and supply chain views uncovers deeper trade and tariff insights.
• Daniel Sandberg—Global Head of Quantitative Research & Solutions, S&P Global
Question: Could you walk through a 2025 example where adding a supply chain feature flipped an investment thesis that looked “right” on consensus estimates alone?
10:00 AM The 180-year-old alt-data company you’ve never heard of
Using private market data as a precursor to public company movements
• Tim Harrington—BattleFin; • Harris Scher—VP, Business Segment Manager, Private Equity, Dun & Bradstreet
Question: Mapping the private graph to tickers at scale: How do you resolve subsidiaries, DBAs, and roll-ups so a DUNS-level signal flows cleanly to a public company and its peers? What are common challenges in the data during reorganizations or M&A? What audit artifacts do you expose so buy-side users can verify the mapping?
10:40 AM New Vendor Showcase—SRP
• Amélie Labbé—Chief Product Officer, SRP (Derivia Intelligence)
Question: How do you see investors leveraging options-like sensitivity data (“Greeks,” like delta, vega, gamma, etc.) derived from structured product data? Is it primarily for structured products portfolio managers and risk managers, or do you see potential signals and “read across” for other asset classes?
10:45 AM Intro to Parameta—Market Data, Indices & Analytics Solutions
• Kevin O’Keefe—Head of Sales, Americas, Parameta Solutions
Question: Based on your benchmarks/indices that are built on scarce OTC inputs, which index most improved market transparency into 2025 market liquidity, and can you share the insights it unlocked that traditional exchange-based benchmarks couldn’t?
10:50 AM Energy/Commodities Data Mosaic
Refiners vs Producers: using commodity flows to pick winners and losers• Gene Gallagher—Director of Research, Exabel;
• Matt Smith—Lead Oil Analyst (Americas), Kpler
Question: Over the next one to two quarters, which metrics in your mosaic best separate likely outperformers among refiners versus producers?
11:10 AM How to Cut Your Alternative Dataset Integration Time by 50%
Integrating and evaluating alternative data is a time-consuming process. But it doesn’t have to be. Harrison Perl, Director of Alt Data Strategies at Exabel, demonstrates how data sourcing, data strategy, and data scientist roles can cut the time spent on this process in half.
• Harrison Perl—Director, Alternative Data Strategies, Exabel
Question: A couple questions thinking about AI and ML as solutions to a few of the pain points involved with the ETL process, enriching the data, and running analytics: For messy but promising datasets, do LLMs plus knowledge graphs improve joinability to an asset manager schema? Which standardized and automated evaluations, such as backtesting versus fundamental KPIs and simple alpha signal backtests, help you reach a go or no-go decision?
11:25 AM Rethinking Web Scraping—How AI Redefines Data Collection at Scale
• Sarah McKenna—CEO, Sequentum
Question: With deep mining use cases (e.g., publicly available consumer pricing and inventory data on large retail websites), how can LLMs be leveraged not only as part of the collection methodology but also as checker agents to catch moments where the source data and the web scraping output differ, allowing for a real-time correction before the output data reaches the database?
11:30 AM Data Spotlight—FlexHub: an AI-powered, Voice-Enabled Market Intelligence Platform
• Robert Hable—Founder/Managing Director, 2iQ Research
Question: (Note: I am assuming that Flexhub is a new product from 2iQ Research, but I couldn’t find anything about it in my research.) How do you see adding GenAI capabilities to your core data product that monitors company executives trading in their own company stock as unlocking potential insights, and how do you ensure that voice-to-text and voice-to-voice outputs stay true to the underlying source data?
11:35 AM AI Spotlight—Advances in AI for Finance
• Saul Cohen—Co-Founder & CEO, CliftonAI
Question: Generative AI is seen by users as “creative” when it generates outputs the user likes but is seen as “hallucinating” when the user doesn’t like the output. While facts can be verified with checker agents (like correct financial figures from a 10-K), how do you think about evals to test the viability of “new market knowledge” created by CliftonAI?
11:45 AM Bringing Alt Data into the World of Gen AI
• Zac Yang—VP Product, Exabel
Question: What do you see as the biggest opportunities for incorporating GenAI into the process of generating insights from raw data? Is it in the tagging and mapping of data or the generation of the conclusions based on large volumes of data?
11:55 AM Advertising Data Insights — Media Intelligence
How will AI affect traditional digital advertising, and what trends do we see from the buy side and sell side? Tracking wallet share and competitive sizing. What effect is AI having as we go from SEO to GEO?
• Joseph J. Berger—Managing Director, Financial Vertical Guideline
Question: As advertisers reallocate from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which measurable changes in channel mix or creative cadence appear first in your data, and which persist long enough to be investable?
What questions do you have for the panelists? Leave a comment below
Know someone attending or presenting at the conference? Feel free to forward this to them.
- Jason DeRise, CFA
