"Our clients have been asking us to broaden our news coverage beyond the usual news-wire content." said Adam Rands, Director of Iguana2, the parent company of Spark. "To achieve this we wanted to avoided the standard news feeds that every other trader has access to. Instead, we developed a news service that leverages the growing amount of valuable news content made freely available on the Internet via RSS feeds."

RSS has become the de-facto standard for syndicating news content on the Internet with most major news websites and content providers now making their content available via RSS. Spark's news service ingests and aggregates these RSS news feeds which enables the content to be immediately accessible within Spark.

"Valuable content is increasingly being published by independent news sources." said Rands. "Using Spark's news service customers can now access content from a wide array of sources and obtain timely, relevant information specific to their investments."

Spark's news service is preconfigured with a number of Australian financial news feeds, but Rands says it can easily be personalised. "If you want to access the latest commodity news, Australian government statistics, US bond rates, Twitter conversations or even ball-by-ball updates from the latest Ashes test, you can now do so from within Spark."

The news service is enhanced by tools that allow users to quickly access stock specific news. With a single key stroke users can display a list of recent news articles that have been published on the Internet about a specific company. "This is a valuable tool to have integrated into a primary market information platform as it enables traders to obtain valuable company intelligence that's not necessarily distributed on the wires." said Rands.

Commenting on the potential for brokers and wealth managers to utilise Spark's news service, Rands said: "Some of our corporate clients want to make their own research documents available within Spark. Currently this content is buried deep in their Intranets or document databases. By having their IT team independently create simple RSS feeds to reference their own content they can quickly and easily make it accessible within Spark."