Digital Contact Eyes Broker Clients for Custom News Feeds

Digital Contact chief executive Gareth Mann says the vendor was first approached by two brokers─a UK-based broker that focuses on contracts for difference, spreads and equities trading, and a US equities broker─who have now become pilot testers of the data.

Mann says the partners will onboard the data into their platforms and research products to support "faster, more intelligent decision making" by clients.

The vendor aims to sign "five or six" of these partnerships across Europe over the next 12 months, with the same in North America, Mann says, adding that early-stage conversations are underway with two firms in the Asia Pacific region. "The great thing about our data is that it can be utilized anywhere in the world. If you've got the distribution network, we can just plug you in, and you can give the benefit to your end users," he says.

Digital Contact will work with its broker partners to create customizable newsfeeds for their traders that will curate relevant news based on users' activity and watchlists. Within that newsfeed, users receive "Pulse" alerts─high-level summaries of sentiment swings around equities that alert traders to abnormal activity in a particular stock─based on users' preferences and how they interact with the data.

"It's like having a Facebook feed for the trading community, updating second by second," Mann says. Not only will the feed give traders information on certain events before any other channels; it will also alert traders to other equities that support their current trading strategy but which they may have not have considered, he adds.

Instead of being a traditional fed of news headlines, Digital Contact's feed will use machine-learning techniques to customize feeds comprised of stories created based on users' individual interests, such as price changes or a pulse alert or event. "It will be combined feed of everything, put it in a format that you're comfortable with," Mann says. "This isn't anything new within the technology world, but it is within financial services. Just as Amazon works out its ‘You might like...' list of suggestions and curates your shopping experience based on your previous interactions, that's what we've integrated into our newsfeed."

In January, Digital Contact delayed the launch of its trading.co.uk platform to develop its enterprise offering, signalling a shift by the vendor to focus more on being a supplier of data services and feeds. "We're still pursuing trading.co.uk, but the retail brokerage market has taken us by surprise, and has meant our efforts have been focused on the enterprise," Mann says. "We have a core set of technologies that allow us to create our data, and... now we work with these partners to tweak the outputs to match how they do business for their clients. We ingest their analysts' reports, their data, and then for every broker and partner working with us, we're effectively creating their own data," meaning no two datasets are the same.