Having spent an entire career at the intersection of global finance, risk management, and geopolitics, Barbara C. Matthews, Founder and CEO of BCMstrategy, Inc., built the unique perspective and distinct experience to create a product that automatically measures and analyzes public policy risks.
"Public policy can drive price action. But public policy risks are expressed verbally while financial market risks are expressed through numbers,” says Matthews. “Our patented technology helps markets identify public policy shifts faster and make better data-driven decisions about risk exposures. The platform is called PolicyScope."
Combining Career Expertise with Entrepreneurial Acumen
Matthews served in senior leadership positions at the U.S. Departments of the Treasury and State (Senate-confirmed), the U.S. Congress, and a major global trade association over the course of her career. She has also been an entrepreneur, founding a successful solo consulting practice. While consulting with large hedge funds, she identified the need to generate automated structured quantitative and verbal data from the global public policy process.
After receiving a patent for 9+ levels of analytical automation that convert the language of public policy into structured data, Matthews established BCMstrategy, Inc. in late 2017 with a mission: to bring the data revolution to policy intelligence. The company seeks to help investors anticipate market volatility, tackle information overload and acquire strategic insight regarding public policy trends using concrete, transparent, objective data.
“Other companies use natural language processing to detect sentiment,” says Matthews. “We instead measure activity levels, the factors that drive analytical, policy-driven decisions.”
The patented data-generating process uses more than 1,000 proprietary lexicon terms to measure activity volumes, not sentiment. Grounded in political science, the process automatically and daily identifies and measures official sector activity across the five factors that drive policy decisions:
- rhetoric (media coverage);
- leaks to the media;
- action (regardless of media coverage);
- data releases; and
- judicial activity.
The data has been mapped to 300+ standard economic sectors to facilitate capital market risk analysis.
BCMstrategy, Inc.’s initial clients are portfolio managers, investment strategists/analysts, and volatility traders. The company’s data as a service (DaaS) solutions deliver a daily feed to global macro and strategic investors who then can use the data to automatically identify when public policy changes will impact their portfolio positions. Currently, key areas of interest include climate finance, digital currency, and monetary policy.
Partners on the Innovation Frontier
Finding the right partners is crucial to the success of any start-up. Start-ups require more than funding to thrive; they rely on dynamic ecosystems and strategic partners to amplify opportunities and deliver guidance. In addition to angel investment, the company recently closed a significant funding round with Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) and has secured distribution agreements with Dow Jones and Bloomberg.
"I was surprised to learn how hard it is for female founders to secure funding, particularly in the information technology field,” says Matthews. “Fortunately, however, from the Commonwealth of Virginia to Wall Street, our company has found committed, forward-leaning strategic partners, our angel investors, and government entities like Virginia’s Innovation and Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP) and Prince William County, who know that accelerating growth requires exploring the innovation frontier.”
BCMstrategy, Inc. won an IGNITE program grant, a competitive non-dilutive grant offered by Prince William County Department of Economic Development with a $25K cash grant for early-stage companies and $50K for companies with funding.
“We are thrilled to become a part of Prince William County's technology ecosystem and honored by this grant award,” says Matthews. “The dynamic, start-up culture and sophisticated workforce here can meet our needs as we expand.”
Located at Brickyard Cowork in Woodbridge, Matthews is excited for the future. During February, the company launched a Bloomberg Terminal app called V3 {APPS PLCY <GO>}, which delivers interoperability between objective PolicyScope data and key Bloomberg Terminal functions that enable professional investors to anticipate headline-driven market volatility.
BCMstrategy, Inc. is committed to contributing thought leadership to the global alternative data ecosystem through its free LinkedIn newsletter and active blog where you can learn more about this fast-growing company.
Located at Brickyard Cowork
2700 Neabsco Common Place
Suite #101
Woodbridge, VA 22191
Share this
Strengthening E-Commerce Access Along the I-66 Corridor
Medication Management Is No Game for Impruvon Health
