GAINING ACCURACY WHEN SUPERVISING THE WEB

When conducting web searches on Google™ or Bing™, how accurate are the results typically? Of course if you’re looking for someone who has a large and prominent web presence, Google searches can be easy. A Google Search on Lebron James will give you plenty of accurate results, but let’s be real.  When supervising an advisor, it can be like searching for a single needle in a vast array of haystacks.

Eagle Eye’s accuracy for a Broker Dealer client who has used the system for less than one year. Take my name as an example: James Cella. It’s not a common name, BUT there are over 50 James Cella’s in the United States and many of us have a decent web presence. One is a lawyer, another a hollywood film producer while another is a sports information director at a small university. So if one were to try to supervise me and were to Google my name, they would only find 4 results out of Google’s top 50 were actually me.

That’s a whooping 8% accuracy.  Now one could say that I don’t exist on the web and hence the low results, but the fact is that I do exist on the web with:

• Blogs
• Business websites
• Numerous active social media accounts
• Mentions in news articles
• Business and personal filings found on the web
• Campaign contributions (I once ran for city council)
• Countless other times I’ve put my name out on the web

So 4 results in the top 50 returned by Google is flat out terrible. Just image how it would look if I were named John Smith.

When we released Eagle Eye we set out to design an application that dramatically increased the odds of finding the James Cellas, Sally Jenkins, Timothy Freemans, or whomever our clients needed to supervise.

So how are we doing?

Overall the numbers are pretty impressive. Our clients generally review anywhere from the top 20 to top 30 results found by the system and they are averaging around 55% to 67% accuracy. One client who has been on the system for nearly a year has an accuracy of 72% in their top 30 and an insane 82% in their top 15. That means that for every 10 results they are reviewing, 7 to 8 of them are the people they are looking for and this is after the company has blacklisted domains they don’t want to review like whitepages.com or classmates.com.

How do we do it? We can’t reveal all the ingredients of the secret sauce, but we can tell you that we’ve built complex algorithms and intelligence into Eagle Eye so that it learns as your firm performs reviews.

So what does all this accuracy give you?

1. An increase in time and efficiency: You’re not wasting time looking at results that don’t relate to the task at hand.
2. Increased levels of compliance and supervision assurance: You can sleep better at night knowing that an automated system is scouring the web looking for your associate.
3. A supervision system:  You move from a clunky manual process to a full-fledged web supervision system that intelligently determines the best results worthy of your time and review.
4. Staying one step ahead of the regulators:  Your firm stays one step ahead of examiners who use the same old manual searching tool you used to use.​