Finsbury
Overview
Finsbury is a global PR firm based in London and New York specialising in financial services clients.
As part of their work for clients, they send daily and sometimes hourly news briefings using the Dow Jones Factiva (opens new window) service. The service has many advanced features and a complex UI which although powerful, is cumbersome for this daily workflow.
Working Studio Overberg (opens new window) we created a lightweight Factiva client, enabling the team to more-quickly curate and send aggregated news bulletins.
Implementation
Architecture
The application is a Nuxt JS (opens new window) build with a custom Express JS (opens new window) back end, hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Back end
There are three main search functions, all routed via the local API:
Articles: querying the Factiva API (opens new window) using the SOAP protocol
Companies and Executives: querying an Elastic Search (opens new window) datastore
Parameters: again using Elastic, called when the application starts
The main units of work were:
building the local API on top of Express which could provide a common interface to all data
learning and working with the legacy Factiva SOAP API and refactoring initial prototype code
learning the elastic syntax and querying the datastore
Front end
This ended up being one of those classic project which had hidden layers of complexity.
We worked closely with both the end users and Finsbury’s Principle Data Scientists to engineer the correct search criteria, ultimetely delivering a simple but effective end-user search experience.
One of the most enjoyable bits of the project was creating a minimal UI to match the company’s site. Here’s our version of Vue MultiSelect (opens new window) with some tight styling and boolean search options:
