Read our new case study to learn how Xignite helped Forbes make their website content more investor-focused by transforming their company profile pages and adding global equities and ETFs stock quote data and other market statistics including open, high, low, close, opening/closing auction prices, and more.

When the Forbes product team began exploring ways to integrate relevant financial and market data into the user experience they knew they needed a data provider that hit the mark on price, stability, and ease of integration. Xignite was identified as a market data provider capable of delivering a wide variety of publicly-traded company datasets in a highly flexible, developer-friendly REST API cloud-based format. 

“Xignite came highly recommended. The quality of the data was great, but what really set them apart was testing and integration,” said Nina Gould, Chief Product Officer, Forbes. “That was a real concern for us because that had been a sticking point with our previous provider. In fact, that provider’s inability to handle the cloud and other long-term technology initiatives are what led to the end of that relationship. From the start, working with Xignite was far easier and presented much less friction during
integration and testing QA." 

Forbes's strategy centered around their editorial content, the primary driver of traffic to the site. Using machine learning and natural language processing, they built a system to identify when a public company is mentioned in a story. The system syncs with the content management system (CMS) and company names are automatically highlighted with a stock ticker appearing next to them. The tickers link back to the company profile pages, which also include recent market datapoints powered by Xignite data.

“Integrating Xignite data with our CMS was a game-changer,” said Grant Tunkel, Associate Product Owner at Forbes. “Whenever a Forbes contributor or reporter writes about Apple, for example, the system automatically inserts the stock ticker next to that name and shows the percent change of the equity price too. So, if you are reading a story about a bunch of stocks you would also see at a glance that Apple is up 2.5% today and Tesla is down 3.4% today. It’s a great opportunity for us to enhance our coverage of the market and provide more context to the reader while they are reading the story, not just when they visit our company pages.”

Currently, the system is live on Forbes’ Business and Moneychannels, which are the most relevant to investment-focused readers, but they are actively exploring options to extend the functionality to further increase traffic to the company pages. They also plan to add a hover state to stock names within stories that will display price, price change, and other stories about the company, all linking back to the profile page.

“We’ve used other data providers in the past, and the difference is night and day. Xignite is incredibly user-friendly—as a developer, I can say that the back and-
forth with the product and brand teams was streamlined considerably,” said Scott Warner, Engineer at Forbes. “Xignite actually has a part of its website
called ‘Developer Resources’ where I can see sample URLs and get requests that do not require me to create more work for myself by downloading PDFs
and Excel spreadsheets of API resource documentation. That is a powerful differentiator that has a real impact—instead of these tedious processes, I can
spend my time on other tasks.”

Read our new case study