Automating Risk Insights: The Critical Role of News APIs in Proactive Due Diligence

In finance, management, procurement, and development – effective due diligence bolsters stakeholder peace of mind by thoroughly assessing potential issues before final decisions are made.

Yet gathering and analyzing due diligence data manually or with legacy tools is slow, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Automated risk assessment fueled by cutting-edge technology is changing the face of due diligence and risk intelligence. Harnessing the power of real-time News APIs, these tools devour streams of global news, social media chatter, and market data – then filter the noise to deliver highly relevant risk insights directly to decision-makers.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how News APIs are recalibrating the risk landscape and facilitating better due diligence.

Decoding News APIs for advanced risk management

Advanced News APIs (like Webz.io’s) integrate seamlessly into platforms and automatically recognize and tag categories, sentiments, topics, persons, dates, and events. They deliver machine-readable, structured data with contextual metadata, offering real-time feeds from open, deep, and dark web sources. 

For due diligence, advanced News APIs play a pivotal role. These tools connect risk intelligence and management software with a wealth of real-time information – helping them take a truly proactive approach to risk assessment.

Strategic advantage of news APIs in risk intelligence

News APIs can be a game-changer in proactive risk monitoring – unlocking a real strategic advantage for C-level executives and teams navigating the complexities of risk intelligence.

For Know Your Customer/Business (KYC/B), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC), due diligence, supply chain risk management, and more – News APIs are catalysts for more informed decision-making. For example:

• For AML and GRC, where the risks of non-compliance are simply too great, News APIs supply the correct and up-to-the-minute data that empowers compliance stakeholders to laser-focus their activities. Access to quality, reliable, and real-time data from KYC/KYB watchlists, Politically Exposed Person (PEP) lists, Money Laundering and Terrorist Funding (ML/TF) lists, sanctions lists, screening lists, and many other watchlists is key to compliance, in a very real way.
• For KYC/B, News APIs help organizations constantly monitor, capture, and analyze unstructured information from across multiple, diverse, and dynamic data sources. This includes governmental rules, regulations, ESG data, and corporate filings – alongside updated data from government sites in multiple languages and multiple jurisdictions, including historical data, watchlists, and law enforcement databases. 
• To mitigate supply chain risk, organizations need to examine data collected from public, government, the dark web, and myriad other sources in order to understand the macro forces that shape supply chain health. News APIs supply data like factors that impact exchange rates, impending regulatory changes, governmental decisions, supply delays, real estate trends, technological innovations, and even fast-changing meteorological data – all of which can have potentially significant impacts on supply chain risk.

Case Study: Exiger

In the face of escalating risk – from cyber threats to financial uncertainties and everything in between – Exiger provides AI-powered tools that extract deep insights from risk-related data for Fortune 500 and government agencies conducting due diligence.

DDIQ, Exiger’s advanced due diligence research engine, relies on diverse and timely data for accurate risk assessments. Instead of building an in-house solution to collate and analyze this data, the Exiger product team chose Webz.io’s News API to handle the complexities of collecting, cleaning, and updating data from millions of sources across the web.

Exiger’s product team seamlessly integrated News API with DDIQ, and is now able to access news data from millions of sites across the open web in over 170 languages. DDIQ calls News API to fetch new articles every hour, leveraging Webz.io’s constantly updated news sources, and significantly bolstering its data warehouse.

Thanks to Webz.io’s News API, DDIQ is now able to process over 2.5 million news articles daily, covering some 120,000 news websites. Since onboarding News API, DDIQ has increased adverse news event identification by nearly 26%, surfacing some 1000 risks across 1.3 million entities.

Operational and competitive benefits for risk management solutions

The integration of an advanced News API into your risk management automated solution offers numerous operational and competitive advantages. 

News APIs enable a serious boost in operational efficiency – since automated retrieval of real-time news data keeps risk management professionals ahead of evolving risks. This automation also minimizes human error, eliminating the need for time- and resource-intensive manual oversight. What’s more, the agility enabled by trend analysis and predictive insights offers a critical competitive edge in the crowded risk management market.

How News API from Webz.io can help

Webz.io’s News API delivers due diligence and risk intelligence solution providers faster, more accurate, and quality news data that fuels better-informed decision-making. Leveraging advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), Webz.io’s News API enables the extraction of nuanced sentiments from articles, stories, and also offers:

• Comprehensive coverage – Regularly updated data from 3M+ news sources from multiple countries, in 170+ languages, that encompass major global sites alongside smaller niche websites 
• Low latency – Near real-time data that’s constantly gathered and updated by smart, adaptive web crawlers
• High quality – Noise-free, contextual data filtered by advanced AI by category (conflict, financial, political, etc.) and sentiment, that includes clean metadata with entities, sources, categories, author names, publication date, and more
• History – 50TB of historical data from news, blogs, online forums, and reviews from across the web dating back to 2008

Webz.io also provides a broad range of supplemental risk intelligence feeds – including a Blogs API that offers blog content from around the world in multiple languages, a Forums API with structured data from forums, discussions, and message boards, and a Dark Web API that crawls millions of sites, forums, and marketplaces in the dark web.

To learn how Webz.io’s advanced News API can streamline and enrich your due diligence analysis and risk intelligence, talk to one of our experts today!