Due Diligence for Modern Financial Professionals

A Due Diligence Platform for Faster, More Confident Deal Decisions

Every smart investment decision is built on well-executed due diligence. But the definition of due diligence has dramatically evolved in recent years for financial services professionals across every vertical.

Once a heavily-manual process geared toward generating a single report to inform a decision, due diligence is now an automated, sophisticated, always-on activity that must be embraced at every level of your firm.

The investment landscape is moving at warp speed — no matter what part of it you operate in. Without a modern due diligence strategy, you’re at risk of falling behind your competitors and losing alpha.

The best market intelligence tools leverage AI and automation technology to transform the due diligence process and widen the scope, scale, and level at which it’s performed. Today, you can access thousands of market updates in seconds, then cut through the noise to pinpoint the precise insights you need.

AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence platform designed to help organizations make faster, more confident decisions. In addition to saving you time and helping to streamline workflows, AlphaSense provides access to exclusive and premium content from 10,000+ public and private data sources. This combination of cutting-edge AI technology and content you can’t find elsewhere places you at the forefront of the market and gives you a powerful competitive edge. In the sections that follow, we’ll take an in-depth look at the different types of due diligence you should be doing and examples of due diligence capabilities exclusive to the AlphaSense platform.

What Makes Our Due Diligence Solution Different?

The financial due diligence process is more complex than most traditional market research. It requires analyzing documents designed to showcase the best picture of a company and requires reading between the lines for the real story.

On the AlphaSense platform, you can lift the curtain to see what’s behind publicly shared updates and reports. You can access quarterly call transcripts, broker research, expert interview transcripts, and other premium company documents that provide a full 360-degree view.

At the same time, you can leverage advanced AI capabilities to pull out the most important insights across millions of documents, and receive alerts so you never miss out on new or crucial updates.

Below, discover the key steps for conducting financial due diligence, as well as how AlphaSense can simplify and streamline the process for you.

Conducting Risk Analysis

Analyzing potential risks and liabilities related to companies you’re interested in can be done quickly and reliably in the AlphaSense platform with pre-built searches that uncover the risk profiles of suppliers, competitors, partners and peers.

After you build and run your search, you can set an alert to get automatic updates about the company or group of companies. When new documents or updates are added to the platform, you’ll know right away and can add them to your due diligence folder for continual and reliable monitoring.

Diving Into Company Financials

You can leverage data from the AlphaSense platform to build financial models to calculate valuations, perform stress tests, and create debt repayment schedules in minutes by:

1. Accessing Extensive Financial Information: Search a company’s ticker and run thematic searches across broker research to quickly find assumptions
2. Performing Time Series Data Modeling: Filter by SEC filings to access income statements, balance sheets (and more), then drill down to see and export QoQ data for trend analysis
3. Extracting KPIs: Filter by earnings calls and see KPIs highlighted in the insights panel. Click “Show History” to expand your view to all snippets related to that KPI over time

With easy export capabilities, you can then extract any data you find in the platform to Excel and utilize it as needed. You can expedite the process with Table Explorer, an AlphaSense feature that eliminates the need to manually spread financials, automatically calculates key metrics, and enables you to instantly validate your numbers by viewing the original source of each number with a single click.

Industry Due Diligence

To understand the complete financial implications of their investments, private equity firms and institutional investors must widen their scope beyond a single target company. It’s just as essential to comprehensively understand the business environments with which their target companies operate. That’s where operational due diligence comes in.

This kind of due diligence requires context, often in the form of qualitative industry commentary rather than quantitative data. In the AlphaSense platform, you can leverage AI capabilities like Smart Synonyms™, sentiment analysis, and our entire suite of generative AI tools to ensure you’re able to capture these insights across structured and unstructured data sources.

Let’s dive into each of these features in more depth:

Industry Comps

AlphaSense Industry Comps enable instant benchmarking across key financial metrics, so you can compare companies at a glance. Build custom comp sets, visualize valuation multiples with dynamic charts, and uncover trends across peers using intuitive filters by sector, market cap, or region. Whether you're conducting competitive analysis, assessing acquisition targets, or tracking industry shifts, Industry Comps gives you the context you need — fast.

Canalyst Models

Canalyst Models bring institutional-quality modeling to your fingertips, with over 4,000 fully-drivable financial models covering global public companies. Each model is built and maintained by expert analysts, automatically updated post-earnings, and built to integrate seamlessly with your Excel workflows. Use them for detailed forecasting, scenario analysis, and earnings prep — all while saving hours on manual work and ensuring your numbers are backed by clean, auditable data.

Generative Grid

Generative Grid is a proprietary feature in the AlphaSense platform that enables you to apply multiple genAI prompts on several different documents at the same time. GenGrid allows you to get instant answers to multiple questions at once — all displayed in an easy-to-read grid format.

This dramatically speeds up the due diligence process and makes it easy to identify patterns in the companies you are conducting due diligence on. It also automates repetitive diligence workflows, by extracting the standard information you need about each company you look into, with just a few clicks.

Generative Search

Generative Search, now with Deep Research capabilities, transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources found in our platform. Generative Search is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries.

When searching for insights, Generative Search helps you get up to speed on a company or topic by instantly surfacing the answers you need. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query. Each answer provides citations to the exact snippet of text from where the information was sourced, so that it can always be referenced back. This speeds up your due diligence process, all while increasing confidence in the work you’re doing.

Smart Summaries

Unlike other generative AI tools that are focused on consumer users and trained on publicly available content across the web, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. As a platform purpose-built to drive the world’s biggest business and financial decisions, our Smart Summaries feature leverages our 10+ years of AI tech development and draws from a curated collection of high-quality business content.

With Smart Summaries, you can glean instant earnings insights — reducing time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capturing company outlook, understanding bull and bear cases, and generating an expert-sourced SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and executives.

Smart Summaries instantly generates earnings call briefings that capture company outlook and provide snapshots of the quarter, so you can spend more of your time on valuable analysis.

Smart Synonyms™

Smart Synonyms™ is the backbone of the AlphaSense search engine, using natural language processing to expand keyword and thematic searches beyond exact-match documents to include all relevant results.

This means you’ll never miss an insight just because you didn’t enter a specific combination of keywords or a certain phrase. AlphaSense understands the intent behind your search and delivers the complete set of information or data needed for your analysis.

In the example below, we ran a general search for “pharma” and “merger”. In just the first few results, you can also see that AlphaSense delivered results for organically-related keywords like “acquisition,” “consolidation,” and “M&A deals.”

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis extracts the tone and nuance that exists behind the surface-level meaning of a document or set of sources. For analysts performing everyday due diligence, manual sentiment analysis would equate to days combing through reports and transcripts to extract nuanced meaning.

On the AlphaSense platform, sentiment is simple to decipher through color-coded text analysis and a sentiment score generated to quantify the qualitative results in a more objective way.

Key Steps For Industry Due Diligence

The following are key steps in conducting industry due diligence, all of which AlphaSense can support you in.

TAM Analysis

The extensive library of leading real-time and aftermarket equity research within the AlphaSense platform gives you access to the big-picture insights you need before making an investment decision. It allows you to uncover key market-level metrics — including total addressable market — and stay a step ahead of your competitors to uncover new opportunities.

AlphaSense offers access to broker reports including company reports, industry reports, fixed income reports, economic/macro reports, and commodities reports — all sourced from leading research providers and analysts. Having access to these analyst insights allows you to be first to know of new opportunities in your market and equips you to accurately evaluate the viability of new potential deals — a critical capability for driving consistent growth in today's unpredictable markets.

Proper Market Sizing

AlphaSense search summaries include all the financial data you need to appropriately size the market for your investment — including market cap and total revenue for all the key players in a given sector.

You can also customize the time windows you need to view to see the market size and share trends over time in order to better inform potential forecasts.

Industry Benchmarks

These comprehensive market views combined with industry reports available in AlphaSense allow you to quickly see how target companies stack up to industry standards and identify gaps and opportunities in their market.

Company Overview

Company tearsheets in AlphaSense provide an in-depth look into any company, including current news, financial records, news mentions, reports, regulatory updates and more. Automated alerts make it easy to ensure you get every new update so your due diligence stays current.

Additionally, company reports written by the industry’s top brokerage firms detail companies’ financial history, revenue trends, profitability, debt levels, liquidity, and more.

Credit History

Historical information in a company’s search summary within the platform typically includes the company’s financial statements, as well as news or press releases detailing funding rounds, history with other banks, acquisitions, and other key business transactions that impact their investment value, cash flow liquidity, and growth potential.

Current Company and Industry Challenges

Every deal comes with challenges. The important thing is to know them ahead of your decision and be confident you’re equipped to transform those challenges to growth in the future. The unmatched combination of qualitative and quantitative due diligence you can perform on the AlphaSense platform gives you the complete context you need to analyze potential challenges and evaluate how they’ll impact your decision.

Reputational Risk Analysis

A company with a poor reputation is one that comes with greater risk in an investment scenario. Sentiment analysis can give you an initial snapshot of how a brand is perceived and highlight where you need to drill down for more nuanced analysis, while automated alerts quickly let you know when an event occurs that could impact the reputation of your potential investment.

Management Analysis

Management analysis is challenging without access to a research platform like AlphaSense. No matter how deep you dig on financials and even public qualitative assessments, you can’t really capture the culture, communication styles, leadership qualities, and business relationships related to a company without firsthand access.

In AlphaSense, documents like earnings calls and expert interview transcripts give you a complete view into any company to help you decide if it’s a viable investment. And since AlphaSense Expert Insights provides exclusive expert perspectives only found on our platform, you can get ahead of your competitors and be more proactive with your strategy.