Business Challenge

The research arm of a European Bank tracks ~1,500 companies that are its current or potential clients for signals of business risk. A key indicator of risk is negative news on monitored companies. All negative news had to be delivered to HQ within hours. The bank had been doing it manually but the process was labor-intensive and was not standardized. This led to the search for an automated process to help them surface and deliver negative news on a real-time basis.

The Solution

The client approached Contify to set-up an automated market intelligence platform which could track all the companies, surface negative news, and notify the account owner on a real-time basis. Contify provided a custom solution to the bank by:

  • Configuring a platform to track risk signals like lawsuits, litigation, fines, laundering, liquidation, corruption, etc.
  • Developing keywords and training its machine learning algorithms to select news for the risk signals
  • Identifying sources for negative news on companies — news media, regulatory websites, legal search engines
  • Populating platform with negative news for the past three years to help build a risk profile for each company
  • Setting up alerts to notify account managers about negative news on potential/current clients in real-time.

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Methodology

There were two problems that Contify solved:

  1. Keyword-based tools like Google alerts and research databases did not work effectively and the team was missing out on negative news — a strict no-no. Contify’s machine learning algorithms, trained over several years, were able to surface negative news without a miss.
  2. Most of the companies being tracked were UK-based and their negative events were not actively covered in the media. Contify set up customized sourcing that went beyond news media to include regulatory and legal search engines.

Benefits

Contify’s market and competitive intelligence tool enabled the bank’s research team to reduce turnaround time from 48 hours to a few minutes. Using real-time risk alerts, account owners were able to act on the negative news quickly. Within the first month, Contify was able to flag 5 companies that could have increased the bank’s risk exposure.

  • 80%

    Reduction in turnaround time for flagging risky accounts

Examples of Intelligence Delivered