Compliance teams buying news data are often sold a promise no vendor can keep, according to Toby Cook, chief sales officer at Opoint.
After more than 25 years selling news, from licensed feeds on trading desks to web-crawled data for risk teams, Cook argues that honesty about limitations is the strongest competitive edge a provider can offer.
Cook began his career selling data to the insurance market, including Lloyd’s underwriters, before joining NewsEdge, an early vendor-neutral provider of real-time news software to traders. After Thomson acquired the business in 2002, he led strategic accounts and later account management across EMEA, eventually becoming managing director of the UK operation. A redundancy a week before the 2020 lockdown pushed him into consulting, where he encountered Opoint. He joined in 2021 to take the firm’s crawler beyond media monitoring and into new markets, starting with KYC and AML providers.
His central point is that “news” is not one product. For many buyers it now means adverse media, yet even two firms doing KYC and AML will define that term differently. Some want press releases, others regulatory disclosures, competitor intelligence or R&D signals. For some clients disinformation must be excluded; for others it is the core business. Rather than shipping a universal adverse media flag, Opoint lets customers build their own definitions.
Cook says buyers frequently misunderstand two things. First, no aggregator can pinpoint the single story that matters. Opoint focuses on what was written, where and when, delivered verbatim with no AI summarisation.
Its filters may narrow results to around 20 articles, but final relevance judgements must stay with the client, as there is no “one size fits all”. Second, he warns that legacy screening against a few thousand sources leaves firms exposed. Opoint’s index spans more than 250,000 sources and processes up to 3.5 million articles a day, materially raising the odds of catching a damaging story early.
This shapes how his team sells. Cook says he flags any requirement Opoint cannot meet before anything else, and will tell prospects when an incumbent does a job better. He advises buyers to describe their goal on a call, then ask vendors directly what their product is weak at.
On AI, Cook positions Opoint alongside publishers. Experts, not bots, choose which sites are monitored, and customers are sent to original URLs without redirects. Asked about the best question a prospect has posed, he points to copyright.
Opoint chief sales officer Toby Cook said, “How do you handle copyright?”
He described it as the toughest question the firm faces, and one it welcomes because it has a strong answer.
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
