Launching an innovative valuation platform

Business Valuation Resources, LLC wanted to build a sophisticated screening tool for guideline public company comps.

BVR describes itself as “the Bloomberg for small, private companies” and publishes data, research, training, and news to inform all aspects of pricing small entities for litigation, shareholder disputes, and M&A.  

Since fewer than 2% of private companies need a rigorous valuation that requires BVR’s expertise, they struggled to make themselves known outside of their core appraisal market. They decided to expand their product offerings by launching the Guideline Public Company Comps Tool (GPCCT).

Choosing Intrinio

The BVR team vetted various providers and were drawn to Intrinio for its meticulous data, friendly and personable staff, and attentiveness to their questions as a data partner. Since Intrinio and BVR are both privately-held companies, BVR also saw an opportunity to build a personal relationship that would be difficult with a large, public firm.

Intrinio designed a solution for BVR that included US fundamentals and market data, along with full external and internal display rights. Working closely with BVR’s technical team, Intrinio helped them integrate their platform with the Intrinio API – and later with Snowflake, Intrinio’s preferred direct database solution. That was the beginning of a deep and rewarding collaboration between BVR and Intrinio.

Building the Platform

BVR designed the GPCCT platform as an advanced, affordable solution for the business valuation community. The tool allows users to instantly access complete financial statements, financial ratios, multiples, and other metrics for thousands of comparable guideline public companies on U.S. exchanges for any selected time period.

BVR wanted GPCCT to stand out from similar platforms with extensive functionality and the highest data quality. Intrinio provided several types of financial data, including:

• Standardized income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements from 10-Q and 10-K filings, sourced directly from the SEC. These fundamentals are processed with a proprietary machine learning system that removes human error and makes the data available within 10 to 30 minutes after the statement is filed. Fundamentals cover all US-headquartered, non-OTC public companies, with history going back to 2007. The as-reported line items for each statement are also available.
• End of day US stock and ETF pricing data, both unadjusted and adjusted. This includes open, high, low, close, and volume; historical split ratios and ex-dividend amounts and dates; more than 30 technical indicators; and associated calculations such as 52-week high/low, beta calculations, and price change. Historical pricing data go back to the mid-1960s for actively traded securities, and back to 2007 for delisted securities.
• Company metadata (i.e. CEO name, company name and business description, company URL) and 100+ calculations and metrics (i.e. price to earnings ratio, market cap, debt to equity, etc.)

Users can filter companies by fields like valuation date, active as of date, period type (TTM, FY, or QTR), and period (i.e. most recent, FY 2019). Companies can also be searched by name/symbol, SIC code, industry grouping, revenue, total assets, and more. The customizable display means that users can get as simple or as granular as they want by adding or removing metrics.

Intrinio’s extensive documentation saved BVR a massive amount of time and effort. Users can click on the name of a metric and be taken to Intrinio’s informational page for that data tag, which features the definition, formula, and details. The Intrinio data tag library also helps users find the exact data they’re looking to include in their models.  

Intrinio’s Excel add-in for Mac and Windows was adapted as an optional GPCCT Excel add-in – useful for users who want to pull data directly into their Excel models. The add-in is simple to use and comes equipped with several premade Excel templates designed by Intrinio. The templates can be used as is, or users can borrow specific formulas for their own templates or models.

The Excel add-in is powered by Intrinio’s API key access system. When users purchase the BVR platform, they’re given an API key linked to their account that grants them production access to the entire Intrinio database. Intrinio’s step-by-step Excel documentation helps users get up and running quickly with no additional effort on BVR’s part.

A Strong Partnership

BVR can focus on improving the GPCCT platform – and innovating its overall product portfolio – without worrying about maintaining their financial data or the Excel add-in. Intrinio is their financial data partner, working hard in the background to resolve issues and keep everything running smoothly. They maintain a close relationship with their customer success manager, whom they can access at any time via phone or email.

They also have access to Intrinio’s built-in ticketing system, where they can easily submit tickets pertaining to data quality and other technical issues. These tickets are promptly reviewed by Intrinio’s customer success team, directed to the technical team as needed, and resolved as quickly as possible. BVR has praised the Intrinio team as “knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive.”

Looking for a data partner to manage all aspects of financial data while you focus on your platform? Request a consultation with the Intrinio team.