Introduction
“Working in an industry that sees daily developments, we’re stuck in reactive mode, scrambling for delayed & scattered intel that’s eroding our competitive edge.”
– Director of Strategy & Market Intelligence, Global Financial Services firm.
For the Director, the issue wasn’t a lack of information but the inability to leverage this data at the required speed. His team was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of scattered data. Rather than focusing on building effective tactics and strategies for the organization, they spent hours sifting through news, press releases, regulatory updates and filings, industry reports, and even social media handles just to stay informed.
Moreover, valuable intelligence remained buried in email threads. Many premium reports purchased lived in silos. And by the time an analyst complied and sent a detailed document of updates to the stakeholders, the moment to act had passed.
As the company geared up to scale its advisory-led services across new regions and expand its client base from over 200 to 350 customers in the next two years, this reactive and manual approach to competitive intelligence did not work well for them.
Recognizing the growing urgency, the Director began exploring ways to streamline how intelligence was gathered, processed, and shared. He needed a comprehensive, centralized market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) solution that could deliver timely, relevant insights, reduce manual effort, and support proactive decision-making.
The Solution: Partnering with Contify to build a modern intelligence function
After evaluating and trying multiple M&CI tools, the Director of Strategy selected Contify’s M&CI platform to reinvent the company’s intelligence operations.
Here’s how Contify transformed the strategy team’s intelligence engine.
1. Unified intelligence in one single place
Contify continuously scans 1Mn+ global sources, including financial publications, regulatory filings, industry blogs, and even review sites. But instead of overwhelming the team with more data, it delivered only what was relevant.
The platform automatically filtered out noise and categorized intelligence by topic, geography, product line, and competitor. This gave the Director and his team a single, unified source of curated, high-impact insights and allowed them to focus on what mattered most.
2. AI-assistant ‘Athena’ for instant insightful answers
No more Ctrl+F across dozens of documents. Athena, Contify’s conversational AI, empowered the strategy team to ask questions and receive to-the-point, business-specific answers. For instance,
- “Summarize Q4 earnings for XYZ Bank.”
- “What compliance-related fines or investigations have been reported in the last year?”
- “Are there any product launches in the digital lending space from regional banks?”
- “What are the latest regulatory developments in the US banking sector?”
The team could go one step further and get answers from the web for complete information bundles. They could also leverage it to generate summaries of multiple PDFs in seconds, saving them hours each week.
“The first time I asked Athena to summarize 28 pages of earnings reports, it did so under five minutes. I knew we had found a powerful tool. With Athena, our analysts now save up to 10 hours of work every week.”
– Director of Strategy & Market Intelligence
3. Automated Newsletter Builder
In addition to generating facts and insights through Athena, the strategy team leveraged Contify’s Newsletter Builder to streamline internal communication. The tool allowed them to automatically curate relevant updates, generate AI-powered summaries, and distribute newsletters to different list of stakeholders on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or custom schedule. This ensured timely, personalized insights reached stakeholders across the strategy team and other departments.
4. Integrated Internal + External Intelligence
Contify didn’t just monitor the web, it pulled insights from internal sources as well. Be it the company’s sales calls, analyst notes, or documents uploaded in cloud spaces like MS SharePoint, the platform helped combine internal information with external intelligence and provide the team with a 360° view of the competitive landscape.
“Contify didn’t just provide data—it gave us clarity. We had real-time visibility into what was happening across the market, regions, and competitors.”
– Program Manager, Strategy
5. Unified and customizable Dashboards for collaboration
Lastly, Contify’s dashboards offered the team the flexibility to create multiple workspaces with customizable and auto-updating widgets like company profiles, battlecards, and more. They could share these dashboards via email or on communication platforms like MS Teams and Slack by simply copying and pasting the embedded links or as images. This ensured seamless collaboration and timely insight distribution within and across different teams.
The impact? Faster insights, fewer blind spots, and more strategic conversations
Within six months of leveraging Contify’s M&CI platform, the Director of Strategy saw a clear transformation in how intelligence fueled decision-making and his team’s productivity.
- 65% reduction in manual effort, freeing the strategy team’s bandwidth and giving them time to focus on more important work.
- 50% improvement in actionable insights shared across teams, enhancing visibility and enabling more timely decisions by key stakeholders.
- Early detection of competitive developments, owing to Contify’s structured, AI-curated feeds that reduced blind spots and enabled proactive responses.
The Company’s Future Plans
For the company, investing in a market and competitive intelligence platform is no longer a nice-to-have; it has become a strategic weapon in their arsenal. As they continue to scale their services across newly identified regions, their focus will increasingly be on deepening their intelligence capabilities and developing sharper go-to-market strategies, all with Contify as a trusted partner by their side.
“Contify has helped us shift from chasing insights to acting on them. We’re no longer just informed, we’re ahead and prepared for the future.”
– Director of Strategy & Market Intelligence
Facing similar intelligence overload? See how Contify can help your strategy team move faster and make sharper decisions, just like this financial leader. Schedule a demo!