How ESG Plus expanded their news coverage and filtered out noise using Quantexa News API
Quantexa News API is the vendor of choice for ESG Plus, due to our unrivalled NLP-powered categorization of the world's news, helping them pinpoint exactly the articles they are looking for, while still enabling them to catch edge cases as well.
ESG Plus is a social enterprise based in Vienna focused on bringing transparency to financial markets, and making sustainability assessments of financial products such as stocks, bonds, and investment funds available for everyone. They offer a range of products and data feeds to business customers such as investment advisors and financial institutions but also provide their CLEANVEST fund sustainability assessments to private investors for free, in order to give something back to society. A variety of different data inputs are utilized to create sustainability assessments that are easy to understand and tell the story of what really happens to your money.
The need for news data
Sustainability assessments are often based on analyzing information such as official company policies, but we’ve seen time and time again that these policies are not always adhered to. Other data sources are required to make judgements and investment decisions in terms of sustainability. News is a critical data source for uncovering the real world impact of issues like human rights, child labor, endangered species, and gender equality. It helps to provide a clear picture of what is happening on the ground, and is an essential component of ESG Plus’s mission. But finding relevant news is easier said than done, due to the scale of global news on a daily basis. A sophisticated news data solution was therefore a requirement for ESG Plus.
With Quantexa we have a lot more coverage, which was one of our goals. But Quantexa News API's categorization helps to reduce the noise too. We feel like we can control it to catch more incidents, even those on the edge that we would otherwise miss.
Thomas Ebenstein
CTO, ESG Plus
Why ESG Plus chose Quantexa News API
ESG Plus evaluated a number of different solutions, from basic News APIs to services lead risk specialists. They chose Quantexa News API for a number of core reasons:
Easy access to the world’s news: ESG Plus were able to instantly connect to over 80,000 global news publishers, or ~1.2 million news articles per day. Every article is enriched with Quantexa’s state-of-the-art NLP, transforming unstructured news content into searchable and filterable news data. This meant that ESG Plus could expand their news coverage whilst being able to find exactly what they were looking for.
High precision news categorization: Smart Tagger is Quantexa's high performance classification tagger, of over 4,500 categories and industries, which makes filtering easy. Critically Smart Tagger includes over 50 ESG-specific category tags, which enables ESG Plus to narrow down the scope of articles of interest, without taking too much away. Without Smart Tagger they’d have to wade through thousands and thousands more irrelevant articles. The contextual accuracy of Smart Tagger compared to taxonomies such as IPTC is also a reason why ESG Plus chose Quantexa, e.g. being able to differentiate between child labor allegations and irrelevant articles containing the keywords “child” and “labor” in a different context (giving birth to a child).
Low-code query building: Search UI, Quantexa’s low-code query builder, is the easiest and fastest way to build and test sophisticated queries that hone in on exactly the types of news articles required. ESG Plus use Search UI’s input query field to instantly check whether their query is providing the intended results, thanks to a variety of auto-generated visualizations and article feeds.
In-depth event coverage: Quantexa’s Event Clustering groups together similar articles (i.e. event clusters), making it easier for ESG Plus to identify events of interest, and carry out in-depth investigations across multiple news sources to validate information used in their sustainability assessments.
Fast time to value: ESG Plus found that Quantexa News API was easy to implement and test, enabling them to start seeing value quickly.
