The latest annual European Online Information Market survey from IRN Research <http://www.irn-research.com/> values the European online market at EUR 3,513 million for 2005, which represents an increase of 14 per cent compared to last year's results. While the trend is upwards, it wouldn't be wise to get too carried away with optimism. In the main, the 2005 growth came from subscribers switching from print to electronic services, rather than revenue created from new sales.
In order to attract new clients and increase profitability, online- information companies need to be adding value to existing products, as well as creating more customised solutions. An overview of activity within the business information sector, over the last three months or so, suggests that this is just what many companies are doing. The summer months have seen a number of publishers and vendors busily creating new alliances and enhancing their products to meet the changing demands of their customers.
Vendors increasingly moving away from core online business
Large vendors are increasingly moving away from the role of general online research business towards one that develops products and services for specific groups of customers. LexisNexis <http://www.lexisnexis.com/>, for example, has just upgraded MarketImpact, a product that is based on its traditional news and business platform but which also uses software for tracking a company's reputation. The premise is all about helping companies objectively measure how they're doing among their key opinion formers by measuring not just the amount of content in the press, but the tone of that content. Its aim is to help clients to measure their return on investment and to monitor corporate and brand reputation, competitive threats and potential merger opportunities. As well as core news and business sources, it also tracks influential blogs.
Other recent developments at LexisNexis include the development of eDisclosure, a product which is aimed at both corporations and law firms. In order to find one piece of incriminating evidence, large litigation cases often require sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents. EDisclosure does this automatically by prioritising where this evidence is likely to be.
For more information on how LexisNexis is increasingly developing products to meet the needs of customers in their day-to-day work, please see an interview with Josh Bottomley, MD, LexisNexis Butterworths, in the September 2006 (34) issue of VIP <http://web.vivaVip.com/go/vip/>.
Making it easier to locate hard-to-find company information
Both OneSource and ProQuest have enhanced their products to help users locate hard-to-find company information.
By taking advantage of its content-mining technology, which employs pattern recognition and linguistic technologies to distil valuable but hard-to-find information from unstructured reports, OneSource <http://www.onesource.com/> has made it easier for its clients to locate strategic intelligence. Valuable strategic data is locked inside analysts' reports, but it can take ages to search and locate such material and, in some cases, it can be easily missed.
Users of OneSource's Global, European and UK Business Browser products can now access Company Insights, a module that provides evaluations of a company's strengths and weaknesses, plus important information on strategic initiatives and corporate relationships. By developing Company Insights, OneSource has added a new layer of value to its company information at no extra costs to subscribers.
As well as requiring the latest company financials and filings, corporate, legal and other researchers also have a need for historical company information. ProQuest <http://www.proquest.com/> has responded to this need by launching an archive of American historical annual reports. The new database, Historical Annual Reports, provides an archive comprising 160 years of continuous coverage for more than 700 of America's top companies. Traditionally, such reports have been difficult to locate as they are scattered around the country on film, fiche and paper.
The Historical Annual Reports database contains the records for a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, insurance, transportation, oil and gas, food and beverage, and retail. The new application meets the needs of legal and corporate researchers, enabling them to trace a company's family tree, including name changes and acquisitions, product lifecycles, developments, financial data, statistics and corporate self-image over time.
Compliance is big business
New and more stringent anti-money laundering regulations have been introduced in an attempt to combat international terrorism, drug trafficking and organised crime. Financial institutions, legal, tax and accountancy firms are now faced with new levels of risk management, and greater demands for compliance than ever before. Meeting these new requirements has created extra demands on information professionals and vendors alike.
Most of the major information companies have customised -- or are in the process of adapting -- their business information products to include the necessary data to support Know Your Customer (KYC) enquiries; others have developed special KYC products. Complinet <http://www.complinet.com/>, a specialist provider of compliance and software applications for the financial services industry, has just enhanced its client screening products with the addition of a new Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) module. Factiva <http://www.factiva.com/> has also made a number of enhancements to its Factiva Public Figures & Associates, including what it claims to be the 'market-first PEP Risk Score tool'.
The term Politically Exposed Persons, or PEPs as they are more commonly known, is difficult to define, as definitions of what constitutes a PEP remain opaque and can vary according to local legislation. Generally, the term is used to describe senior individuals who may be in the military, officials in a foreign political party, senior executives of foreign government owned commercial enterprises, etc. and their immediate family members and other close associates.
The Complinet module includes new content to cover former PEPs. This new database of 165,000 PEPs covers 10 vocational categories for more than 200 countries and territories globally. Complinet says that the improvements increase and enhance its content within three important categories: ex-PEPs and their close family members; international organisations; and high-risk countries and jurisdictions.
Factiva's Public Figures & Associates global database contains profiles of more than 500,000 PEPs, their relatives and close associates, as well as coverage of international sanctions and law enforcement lists. Factiva's new PEP Risk Score tool enables a central administrator to set and maintain PEP risk guidance via a combination of criteria. The risk information is automatically generated in the PEP record and provides guidance to compliance staff as to how the account should be treated in accordance with the organisation's risk management strategy.
The whole issue of compliance - regulatory climate, Know Your Client, PEPs, and compliance products - is covered in the August 2006 (33) issue of VIP <http://web.vivaVip.com/go/vip/>.
Meeting the increasing demand for data on emerging markets
Information companies are continually adapting and enhancing their products to keep pace with an increased demand for data on emerging economies. ISI Emerging Markets, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing, Interfax-CEA, Bonnier Business Press and Silobreaker have all been active in the area.
ISI Emerging Markets <http://www.securities.com/> has beefed up its deal data in Russia and CIS countries by acquiring Moscow-based RussiaDeal's <http://www.russiadeal.ru/> financial deal information. Founded in 2003, RussiaDeal provides English-language information on financial transactions throughout Russia, the CIS and Eastern European markets. Coverage includes mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, private equity and venture capital activities. The company also publishes a weekly newsletter that reports on major mergers, acquisitions and other deals in the region.
ISI's Emerging Market Information Service (EMIS) provides information on more than 70 emerging markets. Available through 15 language interfaces, it aggregates and makes available full-text news articles, financial statements, company information, industry analyses, equity quotes, macroeconomic statistics and market-specific information, from more than 11,500 local and global publications.
Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing <http://www.bvdep.com/> is acting upon feedback from usability tests to upgrade RUSLANA, its Russian and Ukrainian company financial database. Usability tests ensure that the product is being developed according to what users say they need in order to assist with their work.
RUSLANA is aimed at financial services/banks, corporations, consultancies and accountants, as well as the public sector. It can typically be used for financial research, credit analysis and business-to-business marketing. In order to support and promote the new product, BvDEP has established a new office in Moscow.
RUSLANA, together with MINT GLOBAL which combines BvDEP's ORBIS database with a new, intuitive and easy-to-use interface, are both reviewed in the September 2006 (34) issue of VIP <http://web.vivaVip.com/go/vip/>.
The rapid development of the asset-management market and the fast growth of the number of managing companies have generated investor demand for independent assessments of the quality of asset management. However, in Russia products of this kind tend to be below Western standards and their methodology is usually based on quantitative criteria alone. In order to fill the gap, the Interfax-Center for Economic Analysis (Interfax-CEA) <http://www.interfax.ru/index.html?lang=e>, a division of Interfax Information Services Group, has launched Asset Management in Russia, a new program that assesses asset managing companies on the basis of their quantitative and qualitative performance.
Investors and market participants can access detailed information about the methodology of the Asset Management in Russia project from the website <http://www.amrussia.ru/>, a new Interfax-CEA facility. This site offers information on all segments of the asset-management market, such as management of personal, institutional and corporate assets and management of pension funds. The site also carries reports on management assessments of managing companies and mutual funds, analytical studies of the asset management market, detailed information on market participants, news, and comparisons of companies and funds based on financial and other criteria.
Bonnier Business Press <http://www.bonnier.com/> clearly believes in the growth potential of the Eastern Europe market. The company is expanding operations in Moscow as it attempts to become a market leader in business journalism on the Internet in Russia. Bonnier's dp.ru website <http://dp.ru/msk/english/>, which has been operated by the Delovoj Peterburg business daily in St. Petersburg, is to be expanded to cover the entire Russian market. As well as increasing the number of editorial and sales staff in Moscow, employee numbers in St. Petersburg will also be increased.
Earlier this year, Bonnier Business Press established a business website in Ukraine's capital Kiev. The Russian and Ukrainian Internet services will co-operate closely, in a similar way to the business websites established in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Bonnier Business Press publishes financial dailies in 11 different countries: Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Silobreaker <http://www.silobreaker.com/> is continuing to enhance its current-awareness product that helps researchers to monitor and act on potential global instabilities. Currently, all content is available in English language only but the company is planning to add Spanish, German and French content during the rest of the year, a feature that will increase the international appeal of the service.
The focus of Silobreaker is fairly unique as it's based on global instabilities, whether political, economic or related to crime, security, the environment, health, military or industry. It integrates real-time news and content from approximately 10,000 qualified news sources and structured biography databases from other third-party vendors, such as Moreover. It also offers an impressive array of tools for understanding the background of a situation, and the relationship between the countries, individuals involved. An in-depth review of Silobreaker is published in the June 2006 (31) issue of VIP. <http://web.vivaVip.com/go/vip/>.
What I do and what I need
According to Outsell <http://www.outsellinc.com/>, the time users spend on information tasks has risen from eight to 11 hours per work week in last four years or so. Users are now spending more time looking for information than applying it. This amounts to an aggregate productivity drain on knowledge workers of 54 billion hours in the US alone.
In order to halt this drain, there's a need to deliver information products based on who I am, what I do and the relevant information I need to do my job. As we've seen in this brief overview, some information companies are acting on the demand for more targeted products and for more content to be integrated into work tasks. Other companies need to follow if they are to survive.
Pam Foster is the editor of VIP <http://www.vivaVip.com/>,
published by Free Pint Ltd. An information professional, she has been
writing about the business information sector for more than 20 years.
Before joining FreePint she was editor of the Headland Business
Information newsletters and the Online Business Sourcebook. In a
freelance capacity she has written extensively for many publications
and acted as consultant to large information companies, including
LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and ICC, as well as many smaller
organisations. She still writes for Business Information Review and is
co-author of the Annual Business Information Resources Survey, both
published by Sage Publications.
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