To support insurance experts in their news research, the Know Center has developed a “NewsDesk”. It searches various Internet sources daily for new news and enriches them with metadata extracted from the text, e.g., with information about the company, people, and places. In addition, the tonality (positive, neutral, negative) of each news item is determined. Based on various criteria, the messages are assigned to predefined industry sectors and made available to the respective experts.
Acredia Insurance Company specializes in protection against non-payment. Acredia has extended its existing methods for assessing company risk and monitoring industry sectors with information from news sources on the Internet. The aim is to identify potential problems of individual companies and changes in industry sectors at an early stage. Since potentially thousands of new news items are fed into the system every day, NewsDesk offers several tools to support research and analysis in addition to the standard news list display. These include a (faceted) full-text search, various filtering options, visualizations, and advanced methods for searching and sorting the news list.
The monitoring of external data (sources), such as competitors, markets, research fields and their combination with internal data, opens up entirely new possibilities to react to changes faster and more effectively. The combination of many such “weak signals” (new patents of a competitor, new employees of a partner, production bottlenecks of suppliers, etc.) allows a significantly earlier and more targeted reaction.