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Silicon Valley Bank Data Project (view source)
Revision as of 21:48, 28 February 2011
, 21:48, 28 February 2011no edit summary
The organizational hierarchy is: Michael <- Dave <- Dan. Michael has the authority to distribute the data to, or to otherwise engage in a relationship with, Haas [EJE]. Michael may report to [http://www.svb.com/viewprofile.aspx?id=4294967465 Iris Hit-Shagir], the president of SVB Analytics [EJE]. A new individual has been/is being hired, possibly with the title of [http://www.svb.com/careers/search/ Director of Technology], to work with Dave, but has not yet started [EJE].
===The Benchmarking Data===
The bank's loan clients must file either monthly or quarter financial statements (depending on how often they issue statements) with the bank. These are aggregated into quarterly statements for all loan recipients. From 2004 forward, these statements have had various financial variables extracted from them and stored in a centralized electronic repository. Starting in 2008 the 'granularity' of data, that is the number and fineness of financial variables was dramatically increased. Nevertheless the major variables (Sales, Total Assets, Net Income, etc) are available back to 2004. Expense variables such as Sales and Marketing (S&M) expenses, R&D expenses, and General and Administrative (G&A) expenses are broken out starting in 2008.
Aside from financial statement data, the data also includes:
*A proprietary but extremely fine-grained industry classification schema that has been mapped to VentureSource's classification schema. The schema has a three level depth: Segment, Area, Niche.
*The location of the firm: ZIP Code, State and Region.
*Year founded
*Stage of development
The data exists in two databases: an operational database, and a development database which is populated by quarterly draws from the the operational database. Both databases run on an Oracle platform. The development data is validated and cleaned manually by SVB staff, and we could expect draws from this source. The data lives in a series of (flat) tables, with the main table containing the financials keyed as CompanyName-DateOfFinancials, and other tables, such as for the year of founding, keyed by CompanyName.
SVB takes data from the validated and cleaned development database and uploads this onto their online [http://www.birst.com/ Birst] based web-platform, to provide their benchmarking service. Companies accessing this data through the Birst interface are restricted the selecting aggregate benchmarking portfolios to compare their firm against. The interface allows them to construct portfolios on the basis of geography, industry, comparability in terms of financial ratios, and so forth, and reports the size of the comparing portfolio as either 5-30 firms, 31-100 firms, and so forth. Firms are restricted to seeing comparison portfolios composed of at least 5 firms.
The process of uploading the data to Birst is as follows:
*Within one month of the quarter end financial statements are sent to India
*The contractor in India 'converts' the data into electronic format within one month
*SVB Analytics staff clean and validate the data.
*Within three months of the quarter end the data is uploaded to the Birst web-platform
There is a plan in progress to shorten this process and to move to monthly financial data. Specifically, SVB are considering allowing/facilitating input from Quickbooks and other accounting systems, to get electronic data in predetermined formats directly from their firms.
It seems possible that Haas could enter into an agreement to get a feed of this data simultaneous with the upload to the Birst platform [EJE].
