FinInsight enters the sentiment analysis space at CES

FinInsight, a company that has made its name in Korea providing IT and data services predominantly to financial clients, is using that experience to launch a sentiment analysis solution. Its main product, InsightPage, allows clients to query a company or a person’s name and get a sentiment analysis derived from public, unstructured data available on the web.

Sentiment analysis predates the internet. Companies have been using different techniques, from polls to news clippings analysis, long before the first web browser came along. Interestingly, the internet made sentiment analysis both simpler and more complicated at the same time. Simpler, in that the technology necessary to parse vast amounts of unstructured data is now widely available (and affordable). More complicated, in that the number of sources to measure has disproportionally grown in size.

To understand FinInsight’s offering, we spoke to Jinny, one of its data analysts, at CES, who kindly gave us a tour of the platform. The full interview is below, edited for clarity.

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Could you please introduce yourself and the company?

My name is HyeonJin Kim – or Jinny if you prefer – and I’m a South Korean Data Analyst at FinInsight, a data analysis company.

And what does FinInsight offer?

We offer an online reputation analysis service called InsightPage. Our service takes on unstructured data, such as online news and social media data and performs online reputation analysis. If we are analysing a company then we analyse the sentiment against ESG values. If it’s an individual, then we focus on four categories: expertise, communication, trustworthiness and social responsibility.

For example, I might search for OpenAI by typing it into the search bar. This then brings up a results page, like this:

You can then narrow down the view to a certain period, see what related companies come up and get an overview of what the sentiment towards the company is like. If you click on one of the dates in the timeline, it brings up the news that has contributed to the analysis for that date.

And each news article is attributed a sentiment?

That’s right. A smiley face represents a news article that was generally positive, a sad face represents a negative and a neutral grey face recognises a mention that was neither positive nor negative. This all contributes to how we come up with a score. We also list the main keywords associated with it.

We also match these to the ESG categories we are analysing. So for example, you can see that OpenAI scores 75% negative on Environment, 50-50 on Social and 68% positive on Governance.

How’s the company doing so far?

We’ve launched in Korea where we work with a number of clients. One example is KB Financial Group. We are just starting to launch in the US.