Introduction
Hamburg Commercial Bank AG (HCOB) is a private commercial bank headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. The bank is one of the pioneers in the pan-European project financing of renewable energies and digital infrastructure. HCOB offers individual solutions for the global aviation sector as well as for German and international corporate clients. HCOB offers its clients a high level of structuring expertise in real estate financing and has a strong market position in international shipping Reliable and timely payment products as well as other trade finance solutions also support the need of the bank's customers.
We spoke to Michael Sendker, an Executive Project Manager working directly with the Chief Technology Information Officer, about the importance of having a comprehensive media screening tool for credit analysts at the bank.
Identifying the Problem
HCOB does not only finance large corporations that are typically covered by large media outlets, making it easy to obtain information about them but HCOB also supports numerous small to medium-sized enterprises that are not frequently featured in mainstream media. So it was clear: HCOB required a solution to retrieve news about these smaller companies, where information on individual exposures is often only available in regional media. This need was driven by credit risk teams, who aimed to enhance their existing press monitoring efforts to ensure a comprehensive credit risk assessment.
“We were on the lookout for a clean and well-working solution, tailored to our use case with a strong focus on risk-related news."
There was also an additional task that HCOB’s economics team was looking to streamline. This team consists of several people covering different areas of the world for which they require a range of up-to-date information. NewsCatcher’s advanced filtering options allow them to automatically receive bespoke the news relevant to their field of responsibility.
Adopting the Solution
HCOB conducted pre-testing with NewsCatcher’s API alongside two other vendors. They used sample search terms, focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as news availability and up-to-dateness (the number of current news articles), news quality (how well the news fits our clients and provides relevant information), and regional focus (coverage of local media). HCOB configured each API to retrieve news from the past 10-30 days to ensure comparability and checked results for both larger and smaller companies.
“After analysing ratios such as false positives, we found that NewsCatcher had, by far, the best results in terms of availability, quality, and regional focus, making it the clear winner based on our defined KPIs."
Implementation
NewsCatcher provided HCOB with a very handy plug-and-play API, which is easy to integrate into Microsoft Platform solutions. That allows to process the information in a tailored way so that everyone can select in a frontend search terms and receive a daily email with the latest news on only his/ her bespoke requested search terms.
Conclusion
It was great speaking with Michael Sendker about HCOB’s vetting process and how NewsCatcher’s API proved itself to be the most reliable news data provider for their credit risk management. We’d like to highlight his praise for our transparency, which we extend to each of our clients:
“In a bank, there’s a culture of control: we have a lot of regulatory obligations and you need to be able to explain all your decisions to key stakeholders. So transparency and clarity from the data provider, which NewsCatcher definitely showed more than the other news API providers, has been extremely valuable."
Following the successful pilot period, HCOB is now planning a wider rollout of NewsCatcher within the bank.