So, here is the story. BBC announced two days ago that six senior FIFA officials were arrested over corruption charges at a hotel in Zurich, Switzerland.
The suspects, who include a FIFA vice-president, were detained pending extradition to the US. The Swiss Federal Office of Justice (FOJ) said in a statement on Wednesday that US authorities suspected the officials of receiving $150m worth of bribes since the early 1990s. The alleged crimes involved a number of US banks.
So what A Data Pro did about it?
First, our crawlers and spiders reached the news the minute the statement was released on https://www.bj.admin.ch – the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Justice. We took and archived the content in English and in German (Sechs Fussballfunktionäre in Auslieferungshaft). Then some of our data analysts who got the news in their regular feeds, indexed the content according to the taxonomy rules of our aggregator clients. Meanwhile, our editorial outsourcing team (if it had been commissioned by FIFA or other interested stakeholders) would immediately write a summary. Now, imagine that this news was about some local association in a mid-sized country, even in Europe? You would probably never hear about it, unless you know the local language or some giant like BBC takes the story. However, our 35-language-strong team would find it, identify it as being of business interest, sum it up in English and deliver it to your inbox or to the news portal you are browsing.
Which is great because either by indexing, or by abstracting, this news will immediately be available in the appropriate reading folders, alerts and daily updates of our customers (information agencies, aggregators) and their end-clients.
Actually, some of the search strings in over 30 languages are probably pre-built by our analysts. Being a financial professional, you’d like to read about the bribery scandal of six soccer officials and not about some six soccer fans fighting somewhere, right? Thank our team for being able to do that. Even if your vendor is using machine algorithms to categorize the content, chances are we have trained them properly before they went into operation!
And then, some of those feeds from various media aggregators and monitoring agencies would come back to A Data Pro once again. This time, they’d go to our media analysis team. They would analyse all relevant articles on FIFA or on money laundering or even on the hotel where the action took place – as long as this is requested by our partners. The team will then categorize, prioritize and index the news by sentiment and importance. They would also combine similar articles under a single thread and would provide an overview and an expert discussion of the importance of this news.
Now comes the best part. Our risk & compliance analysts will pick this story when doing research on FIFA or their officials. They would take the names and list them in our partners’ databases. When you do your next search in databases against publicly exposed figures, remember that we are probably the force behind it – maintaining clean and updated records one by one. Our analysts are probably already disambiguating “false positives”.
The expert due diligence report writers will come across this news when they do their multilingual, cross-national research and background screening. Then they will check the names of entities (FIFA) and people (the detained officials) arrested and will make follow-up researchers sure that your Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) report is complete and reliable.
We make sense of information! Тhis is our mission. Does it make more sense now?
