For compliance and FinTech buyers, the question is no longer whether news data matters, but whether the data they rely on is wide enough to catch the story that could damage them.

According to Toby Cook, chief sales officer at Opoint, many firms still underestimate that risk.

Cook has spent more than 25 years selling news. His career has taken him from insurance data sales to Lloyd’s underwriters, through NewsEdge and Thomson, and into the managing director role of a UK news business. After being made redundant in early 2020, he began consulting and came across Opoint, joining in 2021 to take its web-crawled news data beyond media monitoring and into new markets, starting with KYC and AML.

His central argument is that news is not one product. Some buyers want press releases, others regulatory disclosures, competitor intelligence or R&D signals. Even two firms working in KYC and AML will define adverse media differently. For that reason, Opoint does not offer a universal adverse media flag. Instead, it gives clients the tools to set their own definitions.

Opoint chief sales officer Toby Cook said, “If we don’t understand that, we can’t sell news. News isn’t a box you ship.”

Cook identifies two common misconceptions among buyers. The first is the expectation that a vendor will surface the single story that matters. Opoint focuses on three things: what was written, exactly as written, where, and when. Filtering can narrow results, but the final judgement on relevance stays with the client.

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