Every investment involves some degree of risk, and in the financial world it’s a concept that’s just as important as return. Risk is everywhere in finance and has to be managed effectively, whether that’s a bank lending money to organisations, an asset manager investing client funds or an investment bank identifying potential M&A targets.
Risk can take on many forms but the importance of speed is ever-present. The earlier risks can be identified, the quicker action can be taken to prevent or minimise losses. However, the flood of financial data and non-financial information, such as news articles, in the public domain presents a huge challenge for financial professionals who need to keep on top of anything that could be a red flag.
How do risk professionals use the Financial Times?
As one of the world’s leading news organisations, individuals working in risk recognise the importance of reading the FT for an understanding of what's happening at global level. There are few news providers comparable to the FT in terms of reliability, coverage and urgency, meaning it’s the preeminent reference paper of record for global financial events. However, even the FT’s most voracious readers would struggle to consume all 300+ articles published by its journalists each day.
For thousands of risk professionals who already subscribe to the FT, the question isn’t how can I get good quality information, it’s how can I get the information that’s most relevant to me, as quickly as possible?
Through datamining licences from FT Integrated Solutions, full-text FT articles are now available in machine readable format (Json) via APIs. FT content can be seamlessly integrated with existing risk monitoring platforms to immediately alert risk professionals to relevant articles based on their own specific warning criteria.
How does a datamining licence from the FT work in practice?
The FT’s dataset contains over 10 million metadata annotations across hundreds of thousands of articles, including public and private companies, people, locations and scoops (stories first broken by the FT).
Public companies in the FT’s metadata are signposted with Financial Instrument Global Identifiers (‘FIGI’ ticker codes) for ease of mapping to client organisations or assets in a portfolio. Previous analysis has identified the time it can take for the market to react to FT scoops involving companies, but the combination of the scoop tag to identify the novelty of the story, and the FIGI codes, helps to significantly reduce the time required to take action following an impactful event.
The FT’s NotificationsPush API service, which is accessible exclusively through an Integrated Solutions datamining licence, enables organisations to leverage the value of unique, double-sourced FT content in real-time from within their existing risk monitoring platforms. Not only does this save risk professionals huge amounts of time, but eliminates the danger of missing something they may need to act on.
Please get in touch with an Integrated Solutions product expert to discuss how your organisation can harness the power of the FT’s dataset for risk monitoring.
