Scott Rosen and the trouble with agreement

An analyst had a number that refused to behave. His forecast for revenue per user per month sat well above the others. Someone from Visible Alpha asked him about it. He could have checked the spreadsheet, discovered an embarrassing slip and quietly repaired the cell. Instead, he stood by his estimate. The other analysts, he said, had it wrong.

Scott Rosen told that story in 2015, while the company he led was still testing its product. It was a small encounter with a large implication: once investors could see the disagreement, they had a reason to call the analyst. A number that looked inconvenient in a table could become the beginning of a useful conversation.

That is an unusually sociable ambition for a spreadsheet business. Rosen, Visible Alpha’s founder and founding chief executive, wanted to make the thinking inside financial models easier to inspect. Wall Street already had plenty of opinions. His proposition was that people would get more from them if they could see how the arithmetic had been assembled.

Before the spreadsheet became the business

Rosen began his career as a sell-side equity analyst in Hong Kong, covering China. He has described spending six years as an analyst and eventually a research director. Those jobs placed him on the producing side of the research trade: gathering information, deciding what mattered and turning a view of a company into something an investor could use.

He later founded Trapeze, an early electronic research distribution platform, in the early 1990s. His subsequent jobs included director of research at I/B/E/S and senior executive at Thomson Financial, where he ran the First Call research business. He also became entrepreneur-in-residence at TheMarkets.com. He holds an honours degree in economics from Texas A&M University.

The sequence helps explain his eventual choice of problem. Research had to travel from its authors to its readers, but electronic delivery left another task waiting at the other end. A document could arrive promptly and still leave its recipient with a great deal of interpretation to do. Making information available and making it comparable required different work.

A consortium before a company

The business developed over years. By April 2013, Rosen was appearing at a University of Notre Dame conference as Visible Alpha’s consortium leader. His panel considered investing amid technological change. Alongside him were participants from Morgan Stanley, Gerson Lehrman Group, Moon Capital and OurCrowd. The title on the programme captures an intermediate stage: there was a group to lead before there was a commercial product to sell.

In May 2015, five banks announced the formation of Visible Alpha: BofA Merrill Lynch, Citi, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley and UBS. Their analysts were competitors. Their models differed in content, format and method. Yet the banks were backing a shared platform that would make those models easier to compare. It was a practical exercise in cooperation among institutions whose everyday business involved having a different view.

The initial service was in limited beta. Its scope extended beyond headline earnings forecasts into segment performance, product sales, pricing and operating assumptions. Rosen said the intended contributor network would extend beyond the founding institutions. The difficulty was already visible in the brief: preserve the individual analyst’s reasoning while putting the numbers into a common language.

A Nasdaq collaboration announced that August brought corporate executives and investor relations teams into the picture. They, too, needed to understand the forecasts surrounding their companies. A management team could discuss expectations more precisely if it could inspect the assumptions behind them. Rosen’s project connected three parties: the company being analysed, the analyst doing the work and the investor deciding what to believe.

The long wait for February

Commercial availability arrived on February 13, 2017. More than twenty research firms were contributing content, and consensus models covered over 1,500 companies. More than 140 asset managers had participated in the beta programme. Those figures give the launch a different texture from the familiar story of a product hurried out of a spare room. This was a service that needed contributors, test users and detailed financial interpretation before it could earn its place in an investment workflow.

The launch combined machine learning with more than 130 financial analysts and sector specialists. That human component matters. Extracting a value from a cell does not, by itself, establish what the value means. A useful comparison depends on whether the labels, periods and underlying business measures belong together. The platform’s promise rested on doing that preparatory work across models whose authors had never agreed to write them identically.

Rosen’s 2017 outlook described a research market under pressure. Easier access to information had reduced the advantage once enjoyed by well-connected brokerage analysts. Active managers faced competition and closer scrutiny of costs. Research providers needed to demonstrate the value of their work; their customers needed a better understanding of what they were buying. The timing gave his long-running project an immediate commercial context.

Visible Alpha broadened its reach through acquisitions. ONEaccess joined in January 2017, adding corporate access, tracking and broker evaluation capabilities. Alpha Exchange followed in November, bringing research discovery and management technology. The remit now stretched from understanding an analyst’s model to organising the wider relationship with research providers. The interesting forecast still needed to be found, consumed and assessed.

Giving research an itemised bill

By 2018, Rosen was discussing a more granular way to evaluate research relationships: which reports people read, which analysts they spoke to, how often and for how long. Clients could attach their own assessments to those interactions. A service that began with the contents of spreadsheets had acquired an administrative companion: helping institutions keep track of the research they used.

In January that year, Goldman Sachs led an additional $38 million equity financing round. New strategic participants included Santander InnoVentures, Exane BNP Paribas, Macquarie, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo, alongside existing investors. Visible Alpha said the money would support product development and international expansion. The financing gave Rosen’s company resources for a business whose usefulness depended partly on the breadth of its network.

That September, Mark Hale arrived from FactSet as chief operating officer. He was given responsibility for engineering, product, content management, operations and technology teams. The appointment brought another kind of experience into Rosen’s organisation: making processes repeatable as the company expanded. Running a service built from other people’s detailed work required an organisation capable of handling that detail repeatedly.

A useful average can conceal a useful argument

Rosen’s later explanation of consensus was wonderfully awkward for anyone hoping that the word meant agreement. In 2023, he stressed that the average was a summary of differing forecasts. The distribution of views could tell an investor more than the central number alone. Calling a collection of opinions a consensus did not make its authors unanimous.

“If there was agreement, we would not need the market.”

Scott Rosen, 2023

The remark carries the logic of his original outlier anecdote. Once the underlying assumptions become comparable, an unusual view becomes easier to investigate. An investor can ask which operating driver explains the gap and whether the difference deserves attention. The platform creates a way into that discussion. It leaves the investment judgement with the person making the decision.

He continued making the case for sell-side research in 2024. Specialist analysts could gather and synthesise views that helped investment managers understand market expectations. In a FinTechTalk discussion, he described research spanning individual companies, strategy and economic analysis. His argument gave the analyst an enduring place in the process, even as the tools for distributing and interrogating that work changed.

Room for disagreement, and for Ted Lasso

There is a public-facing side to Rosen beyond models and research workflows. In 2019, asked what movement he would like to inspire, he chose respect and civility in public life. He argued for engaging across different views and working toward common understanding. That aspiration gives a human companion to the business story: disagreement becomes more productive when people take the trouble to understand what lies behind it.

His LinkedIn activity also supplies a lighter detail. He has declared himself a Ted Lasso fan and shared Visible Alpha analysis concerning AFC Richmond and Manchester United. Fictional football can apparently survive a trip through the research department. It is an appealing cameo in a career spent making forecasts more usable, and a reminder that financial analysis can occasionally allow itself a joke.

When S&P Global agreed to acquire Visible Alpha in 2024, Rosen reflected on how long the idea had taken to become a commercial service. He singled out the team and the continued presence of people from the early years. The recollection placed colleagues alongside the product in his account of what had been built.

The next address for the same question

S&P Global completed the acquisition on May 1, 2024, placing Visible Alpha within Market Intelligence. In March 2025, its data became an add-on offering in Capital IQ Pro. That release included more than a million line items across over 7,300 companies. A project built to translate between individual models was becoming part of a wider financial information platform.

By June 2026, Rosen was listed at Unbundling Uncovered in New York as head of strategic initiatives at S&P Global Market Intelligence and founder of Visible Alpha. The conference considered AI adoption, research funding and the implications of feeding research into large language models. The setting had changed; questions about how research should move, be understood and be valued remained close at hand.

Rosen’s story gives an ordinary spreadsheet cell an unusual amount of narrative responsibility. It can hold a forecast, an assumption, a disagreement and a reason for two people to talk. His business grew around making those distinctions easier to see. The outlying analyst from 2015 would recognise the point: before deciding that someone’s number is wrong, it helps to know why they put it there.