ScoutAsia launches company research tool for Malaysia, Singapore & Vietnam

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 1): ScoutAsia, a Nikkei and Financial Times joint information service, has commercialy launched Connections+, an interactive research tool for company and people relationship data across Asia.

Jointly developed by Nikkei and the Financial Times in 2018, ScoutAsia is an AI-driven news and company data platform focusing on Asia.

Connections+ is jointly developed with Handshakes by DC Frontiers, a data analytics and AI provider based in Singapore. Nikkei and DC Frontiers announced a business and capital tie-up in October last year.

Combining quality content and technologies, ScoutAsia provides insights & signals on Asian businesses with the ultimate aim of enabling customers towards better and informed decisions.

ScoutAsia currently curates news from 50+ publications and data from more than 800,000 public & private companies across the region.

In a statement today, ScoutAsia said that Connections+gives access to reliable, up-to-date registry data for all public and private companies in Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

Other features are:
– Relationship maps that show direct and indirect connections between companies and people, giving users deep insights that would otherwise take days of manual work to collate.
– Includes Entity Profile, RED list, and Entity Information reports.
– Allows users to monitor any shareholding and directorship changes with email alerts.

Nikkei FT Scout Asia Ltd managing director Toshio Machida said that with this new feature the firm aims to make customers corporate monitoring, risk detection and research more efficient.

Meanwhile, chief commercial officer Daryl Neo said to be successful, one must have a keen grasp of the business relationship networks in each market.

“Connections+ is a powerful risk assessment tool when researching a company for a potential merger, acquisition, partnership or investment.

“Traditionally, people would need to manually identify companies, purchase business profile reports and analyse data by hand. Connections+ reduces cost and automates this time-consuming third-party monitoring task,” he said.

ScoutAsia’s Connections+ maps let users graphically investigate the connections between companies and people with up to three degrees of separation.

A map can be fully customised and exported as a PDF, and is an essential risk detection tool.

Source: TheEdgeMarkets