Comtex News Network
One-Stop-Shop for News Aggregation

It is no news that data-driven decisions help companies increase profits, identify new revenue streams, maintain a competitive advantage, and improve productivity. Considering the amount of easily accessible data available within enterprises and across the internet, it is reasonable to think companies must be able to easily leverage and monetize that information. However, the reality is much more complicated. The unending stream of data seems to be both a boon and a bane for enterprises. While having access to data is a good thing, gathering what’s relevant and knowing how to use it poses a challenge—especially for those companies that rely on publicly available information like news and social media content. Take average companies trying to leverage financial news, for instance. These firms make critical business decisions wading through hundreds of news reports that often are high-latency with no control for relevancy and guarantee for consistent delivery. These companies need to invest both time and resources in gathering, categorizing, and understanding the most valuable content amid the influx of information available. Now, imagine if these companies could easily receive relevant, timely and consistently delivered information tailored for their business needs?

Comtex, a leading news aggregation service provider does exactly that. Specializing in the business and financial markets, the company provides clients with real-time, normalized and relevant content from key sources, which is further enhanced with stock tickers, keywords, and proprietary taxonomy.

Following is the CIO Applications Magazine’s conversation with Kan Devnani, CEO of Comtex News Network where he provided insights into his company and explained how they help clients increase productivity and revenue by delivering them the best data.

Please tell our readers about Comtex.

Primarily, Comtex is a financial news aggregator with an extensive information warehouse. We have relationships with a comprehensive mix of global news providers and major companies from the financial services and analytics spaces. Our vast network of relationships helps us have a breadth and depth of content spanning premium paywall and web news data on our system. Whether it
be international and financial market news, press releases, market research papers, economic analysis, analyst ratings, commodities, futures, regional and local news—Comtex has it all.

We leverage cutting-edge Enterprise Cloud based technology to introduce automation in our proprietary software that helps classify content under different categories and themes. It allows us to create customized blends of news that can be tailored to clients’ diverse needs. Most importantly, every content set that is available through Comtex is fully licensed—providing us the right to redistribute the headline and full body of stories.

What according to you is the key challenge in the market, and how are you solving it?

Being in this marketplace for almost 30 years, we are well acquainted with the challenges and nuances of the market. I believe that the proliferation of content is the key challenge today. We help our clients gather relevant news for their business and internal stakeholders by creating customized feeds. For example, if a customer manages a fund focused on publicly traded equities within a certain industry, and wants to drill down to specific products, people, or geographies, we can very easily create a filter. Finally, we can send relevant news to the client, matching this criterion. Apart from this, we have the capability to create customized channels for our clients. Besides enabling our clients to deal with the massive flow of information, we allow them to go deeper and grab the proper information.

Provide our readers with an insight into your API-based approach.

The news content industry was initially based on “feeds” to be sent either through a secure internet connection or file transfer protocol (FTP), which required customers to make large investments in systems and staff to process content. This has motivated us to make content available through an API, which is offered as a RESTful web service—enabling rapid integration into customer applications and portals.

Derived data or client-side data processing is going to play a major role in the future to make information more actionable. Subsequently, we are rolling out derived data initiatives, which will enable our API to provide actionable insights along with relevant content for improved and timely decision-making.

Would you like to share a success story with your client?

One of our start-up clients lacked a large budget for content, but they needed a reliable news feed. Also, they wanted to automate a large portion of the research process and have actionable information for their own internal trading staff. We rolled out customized profiles to each of their traders and portfolio managers. Ultimately, with our cost-effective API solution, they could use the content to make informed decisions and were able to avoid large investment in technology to choose the right content.

Please tell us something about the evolution of the company.

From the very first day, our focus has been on gathering knowledge. We have worked closely with both well-established clients as well as nimble start-ups, which has honed our capability to deliver an appropriate solution to clients with very varying levels of resource and budget.

I believe that we have always kept pace with evolving technology. We were one of the first companies in our space to initiate cloud-based operations by partnering with some leading cloud hosting companies. Today, we can process over one million documents per day, with each content unit going through our value add and proprietary software in just a fraction of a second. Above all, we have relationships spanning over 20 years with many of our partners, allowing us to remain well-versed with changes and challenges in the market very early on.

What does the future hold for Comtex?

The industry is changing rapidly, and both publishers and end-users are struggling to monetize content. Honestly speaking, content is just becoming a building block, but the main focus is on having the right insights from the influx of data to make profitable business decisions. We understand this need and are continuously trying to address it. Striding ahead, we will continue our investment into data science and focus more on our API platform. Beyond that, we are trying to expand the geographical reach of our content.

To conclude, I will say that we not only serve the content-customers but empower content producers irrespective of their size and geography. From normalizing and adding value to content to offering a distribution platform to publishers, Comtex has established itself as a one-stop-shop that serves clients holistically to help them achieve their organizational goals.