For Signal and our customers, access to the most credible sources of information is paramount. Having the FT as a partner who is able to offer a very easy surface to work with, and provide value to our clients is incredibly useful.
Chief Product Officer, Signal AI
Understanding the external environment
Organisations today require far more than just an understanding of what’s happening between their own four walls in order to make confident strategic decisions. Risks and opportunities can emerge from well outside of a business’s typical field of vision, and reputations are impacted by factors beyond employees, customers and investors.
While there’s never been more information available at the fingertips of decision makers, understanding what matters most to businesses is becoming increasingly difficult and overwhelming.
Signal AI helps organisations make sense of what's happening in the outside world. Its platform gathers and processes huge volumes of content globally, including news media, social media and regulatory output. The platform uses AI capabilities to spot critical signals amongst the external noise, and ultimately enables businesses to make smarter decisions.
However, the insights gleaned by the platform are only as good as the data they’re sourced from. Signal AI therefore requires the highest quality content sets in order to provide the most accurate results.
As one of the world’s leading news organisations, the Financial Times is renowned for its authority, and its trusted reporting has shaped the opinions of the global business, financial and political elite for over 130 years.
Through an FT Datamining Licence, full-text FT content is delivered to the Signal AI platform, where snippets from it can be surfaced in search results and shown within the context of other news events. The global reach and unique nature of FT content, combined with Signal’s complex AI algorithms makes the partnership a powerful one for providing organisations with clarity on their external environment.
Extract signals from the noise
Signal AI caters to a wide number of use cases, with customers ranging from PR and communications teams, to investment managers. For the most part, what unites them is that they’re trying to extract signals from the vast amounts of information available to them.
Often what our customers are looking for are any signs of either risk or opportunity.
Clancy Childs is the chief product officer at Signal AI, and is responsible for setting the strategy for how the platform makes news and other external intelligence more valuable to clients. “Often what our customers are looking for are any signs of either risk or opportunity in their particular vertical, within their portfolio, or across their competitor base,” Clancy explains. “They’re interested in topics around executive moves, technology and innovation or things like product launches, partnerships, alliances. These are stories that the FT often reports on.”
Signal AI runs FT news content through its AI to bring an additional layer of intelligence to its users. Paul Al-Nakaash is the head of content licensing at Signal AI and explains that the value of the FT content is in parallel to the value Signal offers through its technology. “We bring the FT data into our platform to run through our AI, running complex algorithms to identify relevant content,” he says. “We also generate AI-driven sentiment scores, and metrics such as counts, mentions and visualisations, including the relationships between topics.”
The FT Datamining Licence facilitates this through offering specific analytics rights and includes delivery of FT content to the Signal AI platform. Users see the headlines, a snippet of text and links back to the full article on FT.com.
Credibility is key
A side effect of information being increasingly available digitally has been the expanded dissemination of fake or questionable news. It’s vital that businesses have not only information that’s relevant when making decisions, but they also need to be able to trust in its accuracy and the credibility of its source. Signal AI enables customers to lean on the integrity of publications such as the FT when trying to understand emerging trends.
“Customers can filter down towards specific publications and say they just want to understand what a specific set of tier one publications like the FT are saying,” says Clancy. “If there are themes that are emerging in there, they can then weigh those much more highly in how they respond.”
Paul explains that while Signal AI works largely with content aggregators, some publications are hand-picked based on several factors. “We typically pick up a diverse and global pre-existing package of content and then look to supplement this where it makes sense,” he says. “We have a selection of direct relationships with media organisations such as the FT where there is unique content, a unique brand, and customer demand.”
The FT’s subscription model for corporate, government and education audiences is platform agnostic, so FT content can be accessed in the environments most suited to the customer’s workflow. Signal AI is adaptable and supports this model by directing users back to the FT.com website to read full articles and access other content. An FT Professional Subscription enables Signal users to transition frictionlessly from the platform to FT.com.
We have a selection of direct relationships with media organisations such as the FT where there is unique content, a unique brand, and customer demand.
Head of Content Licensing, Signal AI
Integration using an FT Datamining Licence
While the credibility and demand for each content set plays a central role in Signal’s content licensing strategy, it’s almost as vital that information providers also have the technical capabilities to deliver data in a usable format.
The FT Datamining Licence provides access to a suite of APIs that enable proprietary FT content to be seamlessly fed into third party platforms and merged with other data sets. Joining the FT’s Partner Programme gave Signal AI the means to separate the value of FT content from the value provided by its platform.
Ultimately the strength and reputation of FT content, coupled with the ease with which it could be delivered through a datamining licence, made the partnership an obvious one. “For Signal and our customers, access to the most credible sources of information is paramount,” Clancy concludes. “Having the FT as a partner who is able to offer a very easy surface to work with, and provide value to our clients is incredibly useful.”
We recognise that individuals and organisations want to access FT content using a wide variety of technology solutions.
Join 60+ existing channels as part of the FT Partner Programme and integrate FT journalism into your client offering through an FT Datamining Licence.