Infront Adds Alliance News in UK Push

The addition of Alliance News and the new office are part of a larger strategy at the vendor to actively target UK financial professionals and build up its existing client base in the country.

Adam Walhout, head of marketing at Infront, says the partnership came about as a direct result of Infront's strategic push in the UK, and will provide London-based investors with news relevant to their trading and investment strategies. "We chose Alliance News because they are focused on the UK market and have excellent coverage," he says.

Under the distribution deal, Alliance News will provide Infront with its Professional Service, which provides around 500 news items per day covering 2,400 UK-listed companies to support equities, contracts for difference (CFDs), foreign exchange, options and futures trading, as well as news on blue-chip international stocks, earnings forecasts, broker rating changes, and political, economic and central bank news for the G7 group of nations plus China, Ireland and Switzerland.

Infront began the project to integrate Alliance News' API at the start of the summer, and the news feed is now live on the vendor's terminal. Users can view the feed via a dedicated news widget, Walhout says. "Alliance News is available for all news clients as part of the UK package. The news is displayed as a list of individual stories alongside other news we carry from Dow Jones, and users can filter by keywords, date and company," he adds.

Alliance News designed its Professional API to be as simple as possible so that third parties can quickly integrate the feed into their applications, says Alliance News chief executive Tom Waite. For example, the feed includes a mapping framework so vendors can map the stocks covered by the feed to stocks on their terminal. "It also allows you to filter the news so you can choose all mentions of a company, or just stories than are completely about that company," Waite says.

Partnering with Infront made sense as both parties are targeting the same UK client base, including brokerages, and buy-side firms, Waite says, adding that carrying a local news provider will be advantageous to Infront as the vendor tries to break into a new market . "We are a local news agency, owned and operated in the UK.... That's important for somebody coming in from the outside."

Given the recently volatility in the UK equity market, with the FTSE 100 index swinging between 6,000 and 7,000 points since the beginning of the summer, Waite says Infront is entering the market at an "interesting" time. "It's an active market so I think Infront's decision to move in was a good one, especially as there needs to be some choice when it comes to terminal providers," he adds.