As the volume and velocity of global information continue to accelerate, organisations operating in risk, compliance, and investment environments face a growing challenge: how to extract meaningful, actionable signals from an overwhelming flood of noise. For Peter Ferrold, CEO of Opoint, this was the core problem the company set out to solve.
“The world generates an enormous volume of news every day—across hundreds of languages and thousands of sources,” Ferrold explains. “But the infrastructure available to act on that information in real time has traditionally been too slow, too narrow in coverage, or simply too noisy to be operationally useful.”
Opoint was designed to address this gap by becoming what Ferrold describes as a foundational layer for decision-making. “We built Opoint to serve as a reliable, structured, global signal layer—something serious platforms and compliance programmes can build on with confidence.”
At the heart of this approach is a focus on completeness and precision. Opoint has developed proprietary technology to comprehensively harvest news content from across the web, while maintaining a strict emphasis on quality. By concentrating exclusively on news—and combining this with human curation to select and validate source sites—the company has assembled what Ferrold positions as one of the most complete and consistent global news datasets available.
The result is a system designed not just to collect information, but to deliver it in a way that is timely, structured, and immediately usable within operational workflows—turning raw global news into a dependable input for real-time decision-making.
Opoint’s primary customers
Two vital customer-groups for Opoint both share the same underlying need. The first, platform builders such as RegTech, FinTech and media intelligence organisations, embed Opoint’s data into their own products. “They need coverage, reliability, and clean integration,” explained Ferrold.
The second, customers within compliance and risk teams, including KYC officers, financial crime investigators and AML leaders, all need to detect risk earlier and make decisions that stand up to regulatory scrutiny.
What do both of these groups share? Ferrold explained succinctly, “They cannot afford gaps, delays, or noise in their signal layer.”
Detection latency
What does detection latency in financial crime mean in practice? For Ferrold, it is the gap between when a risk event happens in the real world and when a compliance team can see it, trust it, and act upon it.
He explains, “Most teams focus on investigation speed — how fast they close cases. But the more important problem is upstream. By the time an alert appears in the queue, the news may have broken days ago, a regulator may already be investigating, or a beneficial owner may have changed. The question isn’t whether your team is fast enough. It’s whether your signals are arriving early enough for speed to matter.”
The challenge of non-English media
As stated by Ferrold, non-English media is a significant blind spot in the industry. How serious is the problem?
Ferrold doesn’t mince words here. “Very serious — and increasingly a ‘Regulatory Defensibility Issue’, not just a coverage gap.
Financial crime rarely breaks first in English”, said Ferrold. “Corruption allegations in emerging markets first surface in regional business press. Sanctions evasion cases in Eastern Europe initially appear in local investigative journalism. Fraud investigations in Southeast Asia and Latin America are covered in-depth locally before, if ever, reaching major English-language outlets at all.”
As AMLA is now operational, as well as Proportionate Monitoring becoming a regulatory standard, a compliance programme not listening in all relevant languages is impossible to defend.
Ferrold said, “The question a Regulator will ask is: ‘Were you aware of this?’ If the answer is no, because you were never listening in that language — that’s a Proportionality Failure, not just a coverage gap.”
What sets Opoint apart
As for what sets Opoint apart from its competitors, Ferrold stressed three key areas – and areas that compound.
“First, coverage,” he said. “Over 3.5 million articles a day from 250,000+ sources across 150+ languages. That includes the regional business press, local court filings, and specialist outlets where risk stories actually breaking first — not just the major English-language wires most monitoring stacks rely upon.”
The second was how the company builds and maintains that coverage. “Our sources are manually configured and quality-checked. There’s no model or bots making quiet decisions about what’s relevant before the data reaches a customer’s workflow. In a compliance context, where decisions must be traceable, that matters enormously,” remarked Ferrold.
The final USP is enterprise-grade reliability. Ferrold remarked, Opoint provides infrastructure for serious platforms and compliance programmes.
“Put those three things together and you get a signal layer that compliance teams can trust — not just to be comprehensive, but to be consistent and explainable when it counts,” he said.
How to avoid information overload
Opoint collects 3.5 million articles each day. How does a customer make sense of that volume without drowning in it?
For Ferrold, that’s the right question to ask, because in his view, breadth of coverage only creates value if the data arrives in a form with which customers can actually work.
He said, “Every article we deliver comes structured with a layer of rich metadata. Topics are tagged using the IPTC Media Topics taxonomy — an industry-standard with over 1,000 categorisation nodes developed specifically for media content. Named entities are extracted from the full article text: people, organisations, and locations, with identifiers attached where available — LEIs, FIGIs, Wikidata IDs — so customers can link what they’re reading directly to the entities in their own systems.”
The metadata, Ferrold outlines, is what makes the data searchable, routable and filterable. He said customers can configure feeds that deliver exactly what is relevant to them – by topic, entity, region, language, source tier – rather than everything the firm collects.
“But here’s the distinction that matters: we enrich the data so customers can find and filter what’s relevant,” said Ferrold. “We don’t tell them what it means or what to do about it. Our job is to tell them what was written, by whom, and when — accurately and completely. What customers extract from that, the signals they surface, the decisions they make — that’s entirely theirs.”
This, the Opoint CEO makes clear, is deliberate, “Our customers operate across compliance, trading, media intelligence, risk, ESG — the use cases are genuinely different for every one of them. A trading desk and a KYC team are looking at the same article in completely different ways.”
Ferrold said the company wants to give customers clean, structured, trustworthy raw material and let them build whatever intelligence layer makes sense for their context. “The use cases are, frankly, endless — and that’s exactly how it should be,” he said.
Where the line is drawn
There is huge pressure on data businesses to embed AI throughout their stack. In this area, where does Opoint draw the line?
Here, Ferrold made clear that Opoint is deliberately AI-assisted but not AI-dependent. He said, “Internally, we use AI to enhance productivity and work smarter — it helps the team move faster on things that don’t touch the signal itself. But the data our customers rely on — the sources, the coverage, the delivery — is manually configured and quality-checked. That’s a deliberate architectural choice driven by what customers actually need.”
He remarked that when regulators quiz a customer about whether it was aware of something, or an auditor asks how a signal reached a queue, the answer must be traceable and defensible.
Ferrold stressed, “A model making real-time filtering decisions introduces uncertainty that’s very hard to explain in a regulated context. Deterministic infrastructure gives you a clear answer. That’s what compliance-grade data looks like. We tell the customer who said what and when; they use that information in a way that is helpful to their use case.”
Does this put Opoint at odds with the direction the industry is moving? Ferrold is clear on this point – not at all.
He explained, “The argument isn’t that technology doesn’t have a role in compliance workflows. Of course it does. But the compliance use case has specific requirements that don’t apply everywhere. Decisions need to be traceable. Audit trails need to be clean.”
Ferrold detailed that Opoint’s value is in delivering structured, reliable signals that give compliance professionals the confidence to move forward and act.
“What customers do with those signals — how they build their workflows, their case management, their analyst tooling — is their domain. Our job is to make sure the raw materials from which they are working are as accurate, timely, and complete as possible,” said Ferrold.
Key challenges
What are the biggest challenges compliance and RegTech teams are facing right now?
For Ferrold, these can be broken down into three things. “Firstly, the regulatory environment is intensifying and becoming global, and AMLA is now operational. The FCA’s and similar organisations’ posture is hardening. EMEA enforcement penalties surged significantly in 2025. Firms are being held to a higher standard of proportionality, not just process.”
Ferrold also raised alert fatigue and suggested that there is a ‘genuine operational crisis’. He added that when analysts are drowning in low-quality hits, they stop trusting the queue – and this is a spot where real risks get missed.
Ferrold finished, “Third, coverage gaps that nobody has measured. Most teams don’t know how much they’re missing because they’ve never tested their signal layer against what was publicly available at the time. That risk is already sitting in their case history — they just haven’t looked for it yet.”
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