For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed HData’s CEO (Hudson Hollister) about how they are digitizing the interface between the regulatory and private sectors by creating and scaling platforms that take advantage of digital reporting. HData’s platform uses regulatory data to automate compliance and business intelligence for electric utilities, natural gas local distribution companies, natural gas pipelines, and oil pipelines. For more information on HData, please visit www.hdata.us.

Background: Before launching HData’s first product in 2021, Hudson Hollister started his career as an attorney specializing in corporate securities law for Latham & Watkins and the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). It was during that time that he realized how inefficient and ineffective the regulatory reporting process is for both corporations and regulatory agencies, as reports are submitted via PDFs that are unstructured and not easily searchable/indexable for analysis. This led him to leave to work for Congress and founding the Data Coalition to push for the digital transformation of regulatory data. After that, Hudson began working with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on that same transformation, which led to the FERC announcing a new digital format that is standardized and searchable for its annual and quarterly forms in 2019 and requiring their use in 2021.

Value Proposition: HData’s combination of both regulatory reporting and analysis tools help its customers realize the following benefits:

Instant Reporting: Built from the ground up for annual and quarterly FERC reports, HData automatically populates and validates information into the correct forms for accurate and timely reporting.
Comprehensive Data: HData users can access and explore clean, normalized, and comparable data: every number from every schedule from every annual and quarterly FERC report from 2011 to the present. Further, HData also utilizes artificial intelligence to ingest data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and matches it with the corresponding FERC information for all regulated assets.
Powerful Analytics: Instead of complex financial models in Excel that can take weeks or sometimes months to update, HData enables management teams to easily compare their own operational trends as well as compare to their peers with data updating in real time as soon as the information is reported to the FERC. Peer groups can also be changed/modified on the fly.

Closing Thoughts: HData is currently helping 23 enterprise customers across electric utilities, natural gas local distribution companies, natural gas pipelines, oil pipelines, and regulatory agencies with their FERC filings and data analysis. We look forward to following the company as it continues to add more datasets and reporting capabilities as well as predictive analytics to its RegTech platform.

Company Spotlights

January 2023