Payments And Forex App Drives User Engagement By Delivering Contextual News on Unique Topics At Scale

Headquartered in the City of London, the client is a fintech behemoth offering solutions across three core segments — cross-border payments, forex and B2B payments powered by a common, integrated technology platform.

With a presence spanning a network of 180 countries, the firm processes in excess of USD 100 billion through 140 million transactions annually. The firm serves more than 40 million consumers, including a diverse portfolio of 1,200 enterprises globally.

The firm offered essential financial services such as investment portfolio management, alongside its cross-border payments and forex services to its large and diverse user-base. The firm was on a mission to improve user engagement for its largely successful, but mostly transactional payments app.

The firm’s product team decided on providing their users with contextually relevant and personalized news updates alongside their financial transactions. The team was on the lookout for a News API that could:

• Deliver relevant and contextually tagged news in the form of a continuously updated feed that could be tailored to each individual user.
• Provide comprehensive coverage by aggregating relevant updates from not just leading global news sources, but also from regional media sources.
• Push updates to users on a real-time basis, as opposed to the traditional pull-based delivery.

While news provides key signals for making sound decisions, in today’s digitally noisy world, users are bombarded by news updates and instant alerts. The team didn’t want to develop yet another generalised source of news and inundate their users with more content. The challenge was aggregating the best content available around topics that were uniquely relevant to the users of the app.

Niche, Unique Topics to Spark Curiosity

To keep users engaged, the team decided on including content related to niche and unique topics. Contify was configured to source content on new-ish topics such as regulatory technology (RegTech), P2P and co-lending, blockchain, cryptocurrency, anti-money laundering compliance among others.

Exhaustive Coverage, Selective Sourcing

New sources of content were identified for the specialised topics mentioned above and some of them were in non-English languages. We configured our crawlers in a manner such that only relevant content was integrated from these new sources. The content was tagged with the new topics and mapped to individual users based on their profile and usage behaviour.

Leveraging Imagery to Boost Engagement

Since the objective was to improve user engagement, including the imagery that accompanies the news stories was a no-brainer — visual content communicates information quicker and more effectively. However, from a technical standpoint, achieving this proved to be a rather daunting challenge.

Just like getting the headline, date, author and leading paragraph from a news article in an automated manner is a technically challenging problem, fetching the right image from a web page (which could have several images on different parts of the page), then formatting it in a manner that the image remains legible is not a trivial task by any standard. It took several weeks of development by a team of our best engineers to solve this problem and develop this solution.

Time-Zone Specific Alerts

To enable real-time instant alerts, Contify’s News Feed APIs were deployed using Webhooks. However, to maximise engagement, the instant alert functionality was re-configured to deliver updates only during the active hours for their time zone — 6:00 AM – 10:00 PM local time.

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