Morningstar UK Integrates Alliance News

Alliance News launched the Alliance News Web service─which provides up to 200 news items per day, covering 2,400 UK-listed companies─last October alongside four other UK equities-focused newsfeed products. The content covers company announcements, UK and international economic news, market reports, morning and mid-day briefings, summaries of broker rating changes, top news, and stocks whose prices gain or lose the most.

Morningstar will capture the content in real time via Alliance's proprietary API and display it on two of the vendor's platforms: the Morningstar Company Intelligence premium-access web portal, which provides in-depth research on listed companies, company directors and other company fundamentals; and the morningstar.co.uk website, which delivers investor education, independent analysis on stocks and funds, and online portfolio management tools for retail investors.

"Our mission at Morningstar is to create great products that help investors reach their financial goals. Being able to offer users of Morningstar.co.uk and Company Intelligence access to timely and accurate news on UK-listed companies, right down to AIM stocks, is crucial to our mission, and we're very pleased to have Alliance News doing exactly that for our users," says Holly Cook, managing editor of morningstar.co.uk, in a statement.

Morningstar is also using Alliance News' proprietary coding system to enable it to map news stories to the relevant companies, indexes and industries in Morningstar's data platform, says Alliance News chief executive Tom Waite, adding that the use of this mapping expedited the process of integrating the news into Morningstar's platform, which took only one month.

"We have been talking to Morningstar UK right from the start.... Their service is complete in terms of UK equities funds data, research and price data, but they were kind of missing news that went down to the smaller UK-listed companies," Waite says. "We have partnerships at the front and back end. We're not trying to build a terminal or website; we want to work with the best partners out there, so Morningstar is an absolutely typical partner."

The agreement follows the announcement last October that London Stock Exchange-owned market data and trading terminal provider Proquote will carry Alliance's news on its domestic and international market data terminals (IMD, Oct. 4, 2013). Waite says this integration is currently in testing, and is expected to go live early in February, adding that the vendor has "five or six more" similar deals in the pipeline.