Why Sephiance
Every tool, compared with asking a chat AI
Claude and ChatGPT are brilliant generalists: they can search the web and, with code execution, run a calculation on a file you upload. What they are not is a system of record. They do not hold your data between sessions, prove their inputs, keep a reviewer's judgement separate from their own, run at night, or leave an audit trail. Here are all 93 of the platform's tools, one by one.
15 tools
Deals & diligence
Buy-side and sell-side work on one company.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| QOE Quality of Earnings | Works on what fits in the window; misreads real exports; makes add-backs itself; no databook. | Proves the trial balance first, reads 20 MB files cell by cell, proposes adjustments for a reviewer, produces a PDF report and a formula-checked Excel databook. |
| JET Journal-entry tests | A full general ledger does not fit in a chat; tests are improvised each time. | Benford (1st and 1st-2 digit, Nigrini bands), round amounts, weekend and year-end postings, just-below-approval, outliers and rare users, ranked into a selection list. |
| QRANGE EBITDA range and seasonal peg | One adjusted EBITDA, stated with false precision. | Adjusted EBITDA as a Monte Carlo range over each uncertain adjustment, and the working-capital peg by completion month. |
| WEATHER Weather-adjusted QoE | "It was a warm winter" as an explanation. | Degree-day regression with seasonal controls, a 12-month held-out test and Newey-West 95% intervals; a review lead, never an automatic add-back. |
| MEMO IC memo | Fluent prose whose figures may not match the numbers; nothing cited. | Every figure in the memo is cited to the QoE fact sheet, so the memo cannot say more than the analysis. |
| LDD Legal due diligence | Summarises contracts; amounts at risk are estimated loosely, if at all. | Extracts change of control, termination, exclusivity, guarantees and more, each with the clause and the amount at risk. |
| ROOM Data room Q&A | Answers confidently, sometimes with numbers the documents do not contain. | Answers with citations, and every figure in an answer is checked against the source document; can run on a local model. |
| RED Red team | A generic list of risks. | The short-seller's case from filings: Beneish 8-variable M-score, Sloan accruals, red-flag language with quotes, and a reverse DCF graded by base rates. |
| FILE Filing cross-check | Cannot reliably pull and tie a company's filed XBRL figures. | Ties a document's figures to the SEC 10-K or EU ESEF filing, and flags unit slips (thousands vs millions). |
| BASE Base rates | Says 12% growth is "ambitious". | Counts how often comparable companies actually compounded 12% for five years, from SEC history, with an interval that does not treat overlapping windows as independent. |
| DAMO Industry benchmarks | Recalls Damodaran figures from training data, possibly from an old year. | Reads Damodaran's current industry tables (margins, betas, cost of capital, EV multiples) at run time. |
| XLMODEL Excel models | Describes a model, or writes one-off formulas that nobody has checked. | LBO, DCF and merger workbooks with live formulas; a spreadsheet recalculation matches the on-screen answer to full precision. |
| MCDCF Monte Carlo DCF | A single DCF value from the assumptions you typed. | Correlated draws of growth, margin, WACC and terminal growth: a value range, the probability value exceeds the price, and which input drives it. |
| COMPS Comps regression | Picks a median multiple from peers it remembers. | EV/EBITDA regressed on growth and margin with robust errors, used only if it beats the peer median out of sample. |
| SCREEN Counterparty screening | Sanctions knowledge from training data; cannot prove a name is absent today. | Official US, UK, UN and EU lists downloaded at run time with a content hash, record count and date; a failed download never counts as clearance. |
7 tools
Credit & lending
Spread a borrower, watch its covenants, price its risk.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| SPREAD Credit spreading | Ratios from whatever statements you paste; definitions drift between runs. | Statements into one credit template from the trial balance, Altman Z'' (1995 coefficients), DSCR and your lending policy checked line by line. |
| COV Covenant monitor | Tests one ratio at one date. | Rolling 12-month tests every month with step-downs, headroom, the EBITDA cushion, the cure amount and a projected breach date. |
| COVMC Breach probability | "Headroom looks comfortable." | The probability of breach month by month, simulated from the company's own history with seasonality kept. |
| DTD Distance to default | Explains the Merton model. | Solves it for a listed borrower from equity value and volatility, with the Bharath-Shumway check beside it. |
| BANK Bank financials | Would need you to download call reports and spread them by hand. | FDIC call-report financials, bank ratios and quarterly profit correctly separated from year-to-date figures. |
| CSPRD Credit spreads | Quotes levels from memory or a search, without history. | ICE BofA spreads by rating, US and euro high yield, with 1-month and 1-year change and where they sit in history. |
| RATES Rates and discount anchors | A risk-free rate from memory or a search, often undated. | Dated Treasury par yields, NY Fed reference rates and debt figures, each with a source receipt. |
7 tools
Funds & portfolio
Fund performance, carry, LP statements and portfolio companies.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| FUND Fund performance | IRR arithmetic on pasted cash flows, with conventions that vary. | XIRR on Excel's convention, TVPI/DPI/RVPI, Kaplan-Schoar PME, Direct Alpha and Long-Nickels, plus NAV-haircut sensitivity. |
| WATER Carry waterfall | Describes the tiers; an error here moves money between GP and LPs. | European and deal-by-deal waterfalls solved exactly: compounding hurdle, catch-up, carry split and clawback. |
| LPR LP reporting | A table per LP built by hand in a chat. | ILPA-style capital accounts for every LP: contributions, fees, gain, accrued carry by hypothetical liquidation, IRR and multiples. |
| PMON Portfolio monitor | Comments on KPIs you paste each month, with no memory of last month. | KPIs against budget for every company, consecutive misses, trend, year-end projection, a RAG status and the 100-day plan's overdue items. |
| DESM NAV desmoothing | Notes that private NAVs are smoothed. | Measures true volatility, correlation and beta with Geltner and Getmansky-Lo-Makarov. |
| BOOT IRR / TVPI intervals | One IRR, presented as fact. | A deal-level bootstrap showing how much the IRR and TVPI depend on which deals the fund happened to do. |
| YALE Commitment pacing | Rule-of-thumb pacing. | The Takahashi-Alexander model projecting calls, distributions and NAV, fitted to the fund's own history. |
13 tools
Sourcing & intelligence
Find companies, follow filings, regulators and public money.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| REG Company registries | Can search the web for one company at a time; no structured registry pull with receipts. | SEC, GLEIF (worldwide, with parents), Companies House and GEMI searches with source receipts. |
| RADAR Deal radar | Lists famous companies. | Signals of who may sell or need capital: succession, tenure, independence and stress, from registry data. |
| GOV Government contracts | Can browse award websites one query at a time. | Awards and payments to a supplier from USAspending, EU TED and Greek Diavgeia. |
| FORMD Private raises | Recalls well-known rounds, or searches EDGAR one company at a time. | Every recent US private raise from SEC Form D: issuer, industry, offering size, amount sold, investors. |
| IPOSTAT IPO statistics | Approximate IPO history. | Jay Ritter's data: counts, first-day returns, pricing against range, VC-backed share and company age by year. |
| TAM Market sizing | A TAM built from estimates found online. | Industry size from official statistics: US establishments, jobs and wages (BLS); EU turnover and value added (Eurostat). |
| MACROX Country macro | Macro numbers from memory, possibly a year old. | Growth, inflation, unemployment, debt and current account for any country from the IMF, with projections labelled. |
| EVENTS Event feed | Can look up a filing when asked; does not watch or classify them. | SEC filings classified by item and severity, with summaries in any language. |
| REGS Regulatory radar | Generic regulatory commentary. | Regulator publications tagged by sector with action flags against your watch list. |
| NIGHT Night shift | Only works when you ask. | Only what changed overnight on your watch list: new filings, big moves, regulator mentions. |
| COVER Coverage notes | Notes whose figures are not cited. | One-page notes on any companies in any market, every figure cited, with disclosures. |
| ATTN Attention | No history of public attention. | Wikipedia attention stored point in time, with spike detection. |
| GDELT Global news evidence | Unstructured web-search results. | Recent multilingual coverage with article links, and an explicit status when the source is missing or rate-limited. |
3 tools
Nowcasting
Read activity before results are published.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| SHIP Shipping nowcast | No access to ship tracking. | Fleet utilisation, laden share and chokepoint traffic from AIS and IMF PortWatch. |
| NOW Travel & energy | No live airport or power-market feeds. | Air passengers, live airport counts, power prices and demand. |
| NOAA Climate degree days | Would need you to download station data and code the degree-day calculation. | Complete-month heating and cooling degree days from NOAA, with incomplete months shown as unknown. |
6 tools
Evidence & accountability
Who was right, how often, and with what confidence.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| CRED Management credibility | Impressions of management. | Guidance graded against what was reported: hit rate with an interval, bias (sandbagging or over-promising) per company and speaker. |
| JOURNAL Decision journal | A chat cannot hold you to a forecast you made last year. | Decisions written down before the outcome, Brier calibration, and the anti-portfolio: what the deals you passed on did. |
| TOUR Forecast tournament | No record of who forecast what. | Brier and log-loss per forecaster, paired tests, and the best blend chosen out of sample. |
| TRACK Committee track record | An AI cannot grade its own calls over time. | Every 14-agent committee call graded against the market at 30, 91 and 182 days, beside the quant engine. |
| REFCHK Reference check | Cannot tie its own output to an outside report. | Our QoE figures against a finished outside report, figure by figure. |
| NUMERAI Numerai export | Not available. | Any ranking turned into a Numerai Signals file for an outside, forward test. |
6 tools
Governance & compliance
Model risk, DORA, MiFID, AIFMD, SFDR and markets.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| LEDGER Evidence ledger | Starts from zero each session; re-proposes ideas already refuted. | Every idea tested and what happened to it, as a readable page. |
| MRM Model risk pack | Writes a policy template. | SR 11-7 style evidence built from the desk's own records: inventory, verdicts, reproductions, change log, monitoring. |
| COMPLY Compliance packs | Generic checklists. | DORA evidence, MiFID disclosure, AIFMD Annex IV figures and the SFDR checklist from the records. |
| DATA Data sources | Cannot use your data licences. | Plugs in your own Bloomberg, LSEG or FactSet licence and shows which providers are usable. |
| PREFS Display & FX | Rates from memory. | Live conversion with a dated ECB fallback; your time zone and display currency everywhere. |
| MKT Markets & identifiers | Holiday calendars from memory. | Open or closed with holidays for about 100 exchanges, and OpenFIGI ticker and ISIN lookup. |
16 tools
Private equity & M&A suite
Valuation, deal flow, merger and fund tools on live data.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| LBO LBO model | A narrated LBO. | IRR, MOIC, debt schedule and sensitivity tables on the target's data. |
| MERGE Merger model | Accretion maths on pasted inputs. | Accretion/dilution and breakeven synergies on both companies' current figures. |
| PREC Precedent transactions | Deals it remembers. | Premiums paid and the implied takeout price. |
| ARB Merger-arb monitor | Can compute a spread if you give it the prices. | Gross and annualised spreads on announced deals, with the implied deal probability. |
| MA M&A deal flow | From training data or a web search; not a maintained feed. | Recent transactions and comparable deals. |
| INSD Insider transactions | Can look up one filing; does not track them. | SEC Form 4 insider buys and sells. |
| ACT Activist tracker | Well-known campaigns, or one search at a time. | 13D filings and activist campaigns. |
| IPO IPO calendar | From training data or a search; not a maintained calendar. | Upcoming IPOs and recent pricings. |
| SPAC SPAC tracker | From training data or a search; not a maintained tracker. | SPAC pipeline and merger targets. |
| VAL DCF valuation | A DCF on your inputs. | Financial-statement DCF with WACC, fair value and sensitivity. |
| DCFX DCF reconciliation | One method. | Three independent valuations cross-checked against each other. |
| PITCH Pitch report | A one-off write-up. | A deal-side summary with metrics and comps in a fixed format. |
| DD Due diligence tracker | A list in a chat. | Checklist, pipeline and deal stages in one place. |
| PE SCREEN PE screening | Cannot screen a universe live. | Screen by EV/EBITDA, debt and growth. |
| VINTAGE Vintage-year IRR | Not available. | Fund-level performance by vintage. |
| CALC Financial calculator | Mental arithmetic that can slip. | NPV, IRR, WACC, PMT and DCF on tested code. |
11 tools
Valuation & finance suite
The academic finance toolkit on live market data.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| FM Fama-MacBeth | Can run it in a sandbox on data you supply, once. | Two-pass cross-sectional regressions on the desk's point-in-time data. |
| PANEL Panel regression | One-off code. | Fixed effects with clustered standard errors. |
| FF / FF5 Fama-French factors | Describes the factors. | Replicates SMB and HML, and downloads the Ken French data. |
| BETA / RET Beta and returns | Fetches prices ad hoc. | Rolling CAPM beta and return statistics on cached history. |
| EFF / CPORT Portfolio optimisation | One-off optimisation code. | Efficient frontier, tangency and constrained (SLSQP) portfolios. |
| PCA / CLUST Factors and peer groups | Not with real data. | Latent return factors and k-means co-movement peer groups. |
| FML Factor ML selection | Untested ML code. | LASSO and random-forest factor importance. |
| SORT Size sorts | Not available. | Quintile portfolios by market cap. |
| OPTML Option pricing ML | Black-Scholes by hand. | Black-Scholes, with ML fits beside it. |
| FCST / FRED Macro data and forecast | Numbers from memory. | FRED series and ARIMA forecasts with ACF/PACF. |
| RATIO / IDX Ratios and constituents | Ratios from pasted figures. | Liquidity, leverage and profitability ratios; S&P 500, Dow and NASDAQ-100 constituents. |
9 tools
Markets, research & the desk
Live markets, the investment committee and the quant engine.
| Tool | Asking Claude or ChatGPT | With Sephiance |
|---|---|---|
| ANL / CMP 14-agent analysis | One model's opinion, which changes when asked again. | A committee of 14 agents: divisions argue, risk can veto, the CIO decides, and every call is graded later. |
| Q / WSCR Quick scan and screener | Opinions on tickers. | A maths-only read of any ticker and a ranked watchlist screen. |
| LIVE Live market tape | Can find a delayed quote by web search; no continuous feed for your holdings. | Prices every 10 seconds for every name held or traded, with stops and movers. |
| STRESS / SCEN Stress and scenarios | Generic scenario talk. | VaR/CVaR, crisis replay and named macro shocks across your holdings. |
| CREG Correlation regime | Would need you to supply the price histories. | Whether the 60/40 hedge is still working, from current correlations. |
| BMAP / CATA Supply chain and catastrophes | No live shipping or disaster feeds. | Chokepoint traffic and disasters mapped to the stocks they affect. |
| BT Backtest | Backtests on today's survivors with hindsight. | Point-in-time backtests with transaction costs and a deflated Sharpe ratio. |
| QR Quant research | Tries ideas until one looks good. | A nightly research pod: hypotheses declared first, correction across every test, independent reproduction, placebo checks, forward incubation. |
| PODS Strategy pods | No portfolio to run. | Seventeen strategy pods with written mandates, risk breakers and an audited settings door. |
An AI could help write this code, and parts of it were. What it cannot be is the system that holds the data, proves the inputs, keeps the judgement with a person, runs every night, keeps the audit trail and stands behind its numbers. Sephiance can also use Claude, ChatGPT or a local model as its own engine.
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