Gaining the intelligence edge with Aiera

Third Bridge is proud to be the exclusive expert network partner in the Aiera Consortium, a landmark initiative with ten of the world's largest investment banks focused on compliant, authoritative Generative AI for finance.

During Third Bridge Partner Day, Dan Thomas, Head of Product Strategy at Third Bridge sat down with Gavin Skinner, Chairman & COO at Aiera, and Bryan Healey, CTO at Aiera, to explore the critical shifts, emerging challenges, and new opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the financial industry research. 

We’ve distilled the core insights from the webinar to answer the most critical questions facing financial institutions today.

Q: Why did Third Bridge join the Aiera Consortium and what is their role? 

A: The speed at which frontier AI models and Large Language Models (LLMs) are iterating is staggering, with new models emerging all the time. The challenge faced is one of trust, compliance, and accuracy. The Aiera Consortium’s mission is to transform the future of financial research by combining cutting-edge AI with trusted industry expertise, through their commitment to responsibility, transparency, and protecting intellectual property (IP). These founding beliefs resonated strongly with Third Bridge, who have for years been the go-to source for institutional investors seeking depth, nuance, and proprietary context through their trusted and vetted network of experts. This strong alignment in mission and belief in ironclad protection of IP for all content providers was what drove Third Bridge to join the consortium and be part of a team developing the leading LLM for financial services research. 

Q: What industry challenge is Aiera trying to solve? 

A: For a while, a key problem in the industry has been increased demand for sell-side research content. Meaning access to content providers, literature and information for the purposes of building, training and fine-tuning LLMs and generative AI products. Alongside this demand, there has been increasing concern amongst content owners about the controls, processes, and compliance around providing access to their content. In particular, who is using the content, what foundational model will be ingesting the information and how will content be securely ring-fenced and protected. Ultimately, IP protection is a top priority for any content owner in addition to robust entitlement structures and upholding data protection standards.  

Q: Why can’t financial professionals rely on off-the-shelf LLMs for research? 

A: The fundamental problem is one of trust, accuracy, and compliance. In financial services, you need ironclad confidence in the source. General, off-the-shelf LLMs cannot guarantee this. The simple answer is that the bar for accuracy in financial services is just fundamentally different. You need authoritative, trusted insights that are ironclad in protecting the intellectual property of the content providers. If an answer provided by an LLM is inaccurate or violates entitlement, the consequences for a financial firm are severe. The consortium was formed to provide the necessary layers of IP protection, entitlement structure, and compliance checks that a commercial LLM cannot offer alone.

Q: What role does Third Bridge’s content play in giving AI "authoritative" insights?

A: Third Bridge provides the deepest, most proprietary layer of human-led intelligence within the consortium's dataset. While the consortium aggregates 60% of all sell-side research, Third Bridge is the exclusive provider of expert insights and interview transcripts. However, raw data is not enough. Success requires sanitization,  transformation, and enrichment to make data AI-ready. Through Aiera’s ‘Language Model Enrichment Services’, Third Bridge’s specialized content undergoes proprietary enrichment (like custom embeddings and compression) that is essential for accurate, contextual, and high-value LLM outputs specific to financial due diligence.

Q: What does the Aiera product do? 

A: Aiera is an established company, formed in 2017, with buy-side and sell-side clients. Aiera offers analysts a fantastic productivity tool, focused mainly on event monitoring, whether it be earnings calls, industry events or conferences. Equally, it allows finance professionals to track announcements from government and regulatory bodies. In total, Aiera is tracking about 50,000 global events annually, covering about 14,000 companies, simultaneously collecting the filings, event documents and collateral that accompany those events. The information is transcribed real-time with voice detect services and then human-edited versions of those transcripts are provided post-event. 

Q: What is the scale and authority of the Aiera Consortium’s data set? 

A: The consortium represents an unparalleled scale of primary financial knowledge:

• Breadth: It includes ten of the world’s largest investment banks.
• Historical depth: The data leverages historical content that represents approximately 60% of all sell-side research written in the industry by total page count.
• Proprietary insights: Third Bridge is the sole expert network contributor, providing unique, human-led intelligence to augment this massive scale of sell-side coverage.

Q: We hear about LLM experimentation, but what is the single most important factor for truly scalable AI solutions?

A: For any firm that has moved beyond the "experimentation phase" and is focused on enterprise-wide adoption, the single most important factor is infrastructure. It is the ability to rapidly discover, prototype, deploy to customers, and, critically, ensure compliance across all of those different channels. Infrastructure is what enables compliant entitlement management and flexible delivery—the key to unlocking the true value of Third Bridge’s content across the entire enterprise.

Q: What is Third Bridge’s philosophy for delivering trustworthy, accurate and compliant intelligence to clients with AI?

A: The Third Bridge philosophy is to "live where the clients live". We recognize that forcing users onto a single new platform slows adoption and integration, introducing unnecessary roadblocks. Instead, the focus is on seamless, componentized delivery:

• Componentized delivery: Aiera (on behalf of the consortium) provides access to AI-ready content via APIs and JavaScript plugins. This allows clients to easily integrate features into their existing internal tools and proprietary workflows.
• External integration: Third Bridge is focused on deploying custom connectors directly into platforms like Claude for Financial Services. This ensures compliant access to Third Bridge's entitlement-aware content wherever our clients choose to work.

Q: Which new product launch for Aiera is demonstrating the highest velocity and interest right now?

A: The recently announced integration with Claude for Financial Services has generated the strongest early interest and the highest velocity of engagement and adoption Aiera has seen for any of its forward-looking product launches. This success validates the hypothesis: clients want the compliance and authority of the consortium, and the deep, proprietary insights of Third Bridge, delivered directly into their preferred, modern LLM workflow.

The future of financial research is compliant, authoritative, and integrated. Third Bridge, as the exclusive expert network contributing to the Aiera consortium, is committed to making our proprietary expert insights safely accessible within the cutting-edge AI tools your firm is building.

Ready to see how Third Bridge's insights can integrate into your LLM workflow? Request a demo.