Global Wealth Management Platform Expands Its Companies Coverage Using Contify News APIs

A leader in financial services, the company offers a comprehensive wealth management platform catering to both individual investors and financial professionals. 

Their platform allows users to buy, sell, and manage a variety of financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs. Its intuitive interface empowers users to track their portfolios and execute trades seamlessly.

However, the market for wealth management platforms is fiercely competitive, and users have many options to choose from. 

Recognizing this and users’ evolving needs, the customer decided to overhaul its platform. The first priority was to improve its platform’s company research capabilities to help its users make informed investment decisions.

The customer decided to expand and deepen the coverage of companies on its platform. The objective was to provide users with comprehensive and actionable insights into various companies.

“Users should be the first to receive updates on any strategic developments, so they can make profitable trades,” is what the customer wanted. To achieve this, the customer required strategic news, updates, and announcements in near real-time. 

Additionally, the plan was to enhance the platform’s analytical capabilities and provide an analysis of financial performance, industry trends, and the competitive landscape. The key objective was to enable users to quickly identify investment opportunities and emerging risks.

However, this ambitious goal presented several challenges, including managing a large volume of unstructured information from the internet, delivering timely and accurate updates, and making sense of unstructured textual data. The top five key challenges are described below.

1. Sourcing of Information: Identifying credible sources from thousands of sources on the Internet and collecting information from them is a complex process. The platform must be able to extract relevant text from news articles, financial reports, press releases, social media, discussion forums, and other sources.Additionally, sourcing information from international sources to provide a global perspective requires accurate and automated language translation capabilities. Also, because of the dynamic nature of the internet, the sources library must be continually updated with new sources, and deprecated sources must be removed.
2. Continuous Data Refresh: The platform requires continuous refresh data to provide users with actionable information in near real-time. Timely updates allow users to develop information asymmetry and act before others.This is crucial for the customer to maintain a competitive edge over its competitors. Achieving continuous data ingestion and processing while maintaining high data quality requires a sophisticated web crawling infrastructure and advanced text data processing techniques.
3. Company Tagging: A simple task, such as identifying the correct company in the text, requires a sophisticated information processing pipeline.For example, companies may have similar names, such as “Target Corp.,” “Target Securities,” or “Target Marketing, LLC.” Names could also be common English words like “Gap,” “Shell,” and “Apple.”Accurately identifying the company and attributing data to it requires advanced NLP (natural language processing) techniques and NER (named entity recognition) algorithms.This is called a “disambiguation problem.” Without a robust disambiguation pipeline, information might be incorrectly assigned to similar-named companies, causing confusion and potential investment errors.Another complex problem in company tagging is the “aboutness problem.” It determines whether the information is about the company of interest or merely a mention. This requires context-aware text processing technology, such as Generative AI.
4. Removing Irrelevant and Duplicate Information: Filtering out irrelevant information from multiple sources is critical to maintaining the quality and usefulness of information.Duplicate or similar information clutters the platform and obscures important insights. With the vast amount of information available, distinguishing between strategic signals and noise is not straightforward.This involves advanced information processing mechanisms to exclude irrelevant noise in the data and implementing robust de-duplication processes to ensure only unique, high-quality data is presented to users.
5. Data Organization and Categorization: To analyze data, identify patterns, and derive actional insights, the data has to be organized into meaningful categories.Therefore, the platform must support a flexible taxonomy and classification system to manage custom tags. This also requires developing custom machine learning models to tag the information according to the user’s interests and investment strategies.Accurate data organization and topic classification enhance the overall user experience and make the platform more effective for research and analysis.

The customer evaluated several vendors and data aggregators and found gaps in data consistency and comprehensiveness. 

They were missing one or more critical features, such as custom crawling capabilities, company-name disambiguation, noise reduction, classification algorithms, or advanced search operators. 

These challenges underscored the need for a comprehensive all-in-one solution. After a detailed evaluation, Contify News API was selected because it offered features and customizations necessary to meet the customer’s objectives. 

Custom crawling infrastructure

One key challenge was identifying and tracking relevant information from companies’ websites. Contify’s key differentiator is its proprietary custom-crawling infrastructure, which can fetch data from any website online. 

It offers the flexibility to incorporate niche sources, proprietary data, or specialized news feeds, catering to users’ unique needs.

With Contifiy’s in-house developed custom web crawling capabilities, customers can add unique, domain-specific websites even without any RSS feed, such as company websites, job boards, discussion forums, stock exchanges, trade journals, and more. Adding custom sources is especially useful for information on smaller or private companies. 

Customizable data processing pipelines

The customer wanted to track stock buy/sell calls from selected sources. Contify’s proprietary noise-removal algorithms usually consider this irrelevant noise. Contify easily re-configured its data processing pipeline to include stock calls for the company, which are usually excluded for other customers. 

In addition, disambiguation algorithms ensure that users get precise information about the intended company without any ambiguity, eliminating the possibility of mixing up or associating data with incorrect companies. This further differentiated the customer’s platform with enhanced accuracy and reliability.

Advanced Search Operators

Contify News API was refined using advanced search operators to cut through the noise and deliver targeted intelligence. These operators include semantic search parameters that prioritize information directly related to investment decisions. 

For example, API queries were refined using search operators such as “Business Expansion” or “Negative News.” Contify’s News APIs offer many such advanced operators, allowing users to retrieve precise and targeted data feeds. 

Custom Taxonomy

To enable in-depth analysis of company information, Contify News API offers a taxonomy builder that comes with pre-configured tags and has options to create custom tags. This helped the customer organize information according to user preferences for different sections of its platform. 

Contify’s News API pre-configured taxonomy includes strategic business events, industry themes, locations, etc. This AI-based automated tagging provided high-quality tagged information on millions of companies.

Delivery Through WebHooks

The customer wanted its users to be informed whenever something important happened in one of their portfolio companies but didn’t want them to check for updates constantly. Contify’s webhooks were ideal for this use case. 

WebHooks act like messengers between the Contify system and the customer’s platform. A webhook automatically sends a notification containing relevant data to the wealth-management platform whenever a strategic event occurs. The customer seamlessly integrated Contify News API WebHooks, facilitating the delivery of critical and targeted updates on portfolio companies.

Multi-Language Support

The customer wanted to track company information globally, including content in different languages. Contify’s multi-language support with auto-translation ensured the customer platform offered users the most comprehensive company coverage, differentiating it from other wealth management platforms. 

Implementing Contify’s News API helped the customer achieve its key objective of expanding and deepening the coverage of companies on its platform. It significantly enhanced its wealth management platform, and the results were tangible, with improvements in key areas:

Enriched Platform

Contify News API enriched the wealth management platform with targeted and actionable insights on nearly 150,000 companies. This differentiates the platform from competitors by significantly enhancing its value proposition to users.

Operational Efficiency

By automating key tasks such as information aggregation, curation, and insights generation, Contify News API enabled the customer to achieve measurable efficiency gains. These automation efforts translate into time and effort savings, allowing the customer to reallocate resources toward high-value strategic initiatives.

Improved User Retention

The customer’s users gained comprehensive and deeper insights into their portfolio company. This heightened coverage demonstrated the customer’s commitment to innovation and enhanced user retention, strengthening user relationships and fostering loyalty.

“We found the solution our platform needed in Contify’s News APIs. This has given our platform a significant power-up, enabling us to track and profile companies across multiple industries with unparalleled accuracy. Overall, it has enhanced our platform’s value proposition and positioned us for continued success across the global wealth management platforms.”