We recently had the opportunity to interview Mishaal Al Gergawi, the co-founder and CEO of Axis, and Tala Makhoul, the Data Manager at Axis. They shared enlightening insights on how their team employs the NewsCatcher API to optimize their regulatory data processing.
About Axis
Axis is a comprehensive knowledge base providing information on government regulations and officials to facilitate large organizations' smooth operations in international markets. For example, if an organization is operating in Saudi Arabia, Axis' software would provide information on the necessary laws for compliance, and officials required for approvals.
Axis collects and organizes vast amounts of data, structuring, labeling, and connecting it to help government affairs and public policy teams in Fortune 2000 companies better comprehend the regulatory landscapes of the countries where they operate. By offering real-time data access through a subscription-based product, Axis eliminates the need to hire consultants or browse the internet for relevant information.
Although Axis is industry-agnostic, its pain points intensify in higher-velocity or highly-regulated industries, such as tobacco, pharmaceuticals, food delivery, ride-hailing, FinTech, and cryptocurrency. By contrast, established low-velocity industries like construction rarely experience regulation changes. Nevertheless, having a thorough understanding of various regulations is crucial for ensuring seamless operations across multiple jurisdictions at a larger scale.
Identifying the Problem
Before adopting the NewsCatcher API, Axis relied on Inoreader, a public feed reader offering a rudimentary RSS service for regular news updates. However, Inoreader provided inadequate coverage of regulatory updates due to the gaps created by many regulatory websites' lack of RSS compatibility, causing Axis to miss crucial updates.
Additionally, Axis faced challenges in processing and optimizing the data to derive second or third-order insights, such as the frequency of Saudi foreign minister's meetings with their Chinese and Indian counterparts. The inherent complexity in running machine learning models, tagging events and entities, classifying regulations, and building Elasticsearch clusters and a Neo4j database was compounded by the concerns regarding data quality and the need to extract data from new websites with constantly changing structures.
Adopting the Solution
The introduction of NewsCatcher API relieved Axis from worrying about the input data quality, allowing them to focus on enhancing their core data processing and enrichment pipeline. NewsCatcher's normalized and standardized data, combined with their scalable crawlers, enabled Axis to rapidly expand the list of regulatory feeds ingested into their system.
The quantity and quality of classified and summarized articles have increased substantially when compared to the simple RSS reader used previously. Axis now focuses on refining their categorization models to accept and classify more articles, ultimately enriching their knowledge base with valuable relationships and insights.
Mishaal and Tala expressed their satisfaction with the improvements attributed to NewsCatcher's services, praising it as a crucial provider of news data, relieving them of the burden associated with maintaining an incoming data stream.
“Not worrying about the input of the data so that we can do things like that is essential. It’s almost like we were a farm-to-table restaurant, and we were growing our own vegetables. And then NewsCatcher guys came in and said, ‘You don’t have to worry about that. Just focus on the kitchen.”
Conclusion
Axis' experience with NewsCatcher API demonstrates the value and impact of a reliable news data provider on optimizing regulatory data processing and facilitating more efficient operations in the highly competitive market of international business. The collaborative engagement with NewsCatcher API has provided Axis with a system that ingests a higher volume of categorized and summarized articles compared to previous solutions, allowing them to focus on refining their core processes and significantly benefit their customers.
Business Results
Using the NewsCatcher News API, the Axis team has:
- Started incorporating data from 22 new countries.
- Publish 100x more events in their knowledge-base