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Financial data is easy to come by these days – just consider the prevalence of stock tickers on TV news channels. But what do the numbers mean? Moreover, how do they relate to the past performance of markets and what may happen down the road? Researcher Xiao-Ping Zhang has come up with a tool to answer those questions – and more importantly, he has brought it to the marketplace.

A professor and graduate studies program director in electrical and computer engineering, Zhang is an expert on signal and information processing, a field that lends itself to many applications. More recently, he expanded his research from digital signals within multimedia content to finance, economics and marketing.

Zhang also co-founded EidoSearch, a company that offers financial professionals an innovative and intelligent search tool to analyze numerical data accurately and promptly, and going a major step further, identifies relationships among many variables. “My work involves making sense of data and extracting useful information from it,” says Zhang.

In the financial world, there is a great deal of digital information to process, everything from interest rates and price indexes to agricultural data and gross domestic product.

Zhang’s intelligent search tool picks up where other financial software technologies leave off, providing a big-picture perspective of historical patterns in the market. Using a cloud-based service rather than complex programming tools, financial analysts can use those patterns to gain valuable insight into various markets such as housing starts, commodities, and future stock trends.  

“Ultimately, it’s about doing a more robust search for underlying statistical relationships, rather than simply looking things up in traditional databases,”Zhang says. “The technology could change the way that financial professionals use data and arrive at decisions.”

Zhang’s search tool, which was developed with the assistance of several Ryerson graduate students, is now being used by a number of investment banks and mutual fund companies. But along with clients, EidoSearch has also been collecting accolades.

At the Ontario Centres of Excellence Discovery12 show in Toronto last May, the company was named the winner of the Alpha Exchange Innovation Campaign.  Sponsored by Backbone magazine, the competition saw 10 Canadian early-stage companies pitch their ideas to a panel of expert judges. As the competition’s champion, the EidoSearch team, which also includes co-founder and president David Kedmey, took home $20,000 and among other prizes, a four-month stint in Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone, an incubator for up-and-coming companies.

Finally, in July, Zhang and Kedmey wrapped up an intensive, 12-week program with the FinTech Innovation Lab. Run by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture, the annual program nurtures the growth of startup companies that have developed technologies for the financial services sector. EidoSearch was accepted into the FinTech Innovation Lab after being selected as one of the top six North American technology innovators in the financial industry.

That recognition has paid off. Today, in fact, EidoSearch is working with some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including Credit Suisse Group, to help them incorporate Zhang’s search tool into their work processes.