Fitch Ratings enters into a sophisticated digital age with Contentful and Appnovation

For more than a century, Fitch Ratings has been a global leader in the credit rating business. And, while the brand is an expert in collecting and publishing complex research, rating actions and insights in various forms – text, image and video — it needed a little help with organization and presentation. Fitch Ratings wanted to modernize its website in a way that would please internal and end users spread across 30 countries while still maintaining multi-jurisdiction compliance and strong performance. 

In 2019, Fitch Ratings website owner Peter Jones reached out to digital consultancy and Contentful solution partner Appnovation for strategic recommendations and implementation support. Appnovation had the experience and talent to bring Fitch Ratings's site into the 21st century. They went one step further, teaching internal team members how to better manage their new site going forward.  

Appnovation rolled out the new Fitch Ratings website on the Contentful platform in March 2020 after successfully moving the website to a cloud-native digital stack.

When the customer really needs to come first

At the onset of their digital transformation, Fitch Ratings defined how to support better internal user experiences — which meant discussing what wasn’t working. Internal users reported a lack of site sophistication across the board. Most specifically, their current content solution offered little support for promotional efforts, frequently dropped newsletter opt-ins and mixed-up editorial and product offerings more often than not. While these issues caused headaches for almost everyone on the Fitch Rating team, they were the most disruptive to the developers and content creators tasked with ironing out these errors. 

Publishing speed was another pain point. With a system slow to compile and a rigid interface, Fitch Ratings struggled to scale despite paying top dollar for its legacy CMS-tied code. “We live in a very media-driven world. We produce top-quality videos, webinars, podcasts, interactive content and knew we’d need a more robust, flexible platform to support that,” said Peter. “We needed a structure that was contextual and interest-driven.”

Key to content migration: Starting small with a proof of concept

After Appnovation and Fitch Ratings determined additional platform needs, they married those with predetermined ones. The new platform would have to be able to gather analytics and publish large masses of content (upwards of half a million articles, all with compliance requirements) from different sources, including backend systems and live feeds.

“We needed to make this completely component-driven, enabling Fitch to reuse functionality as required and make it sociable. We wrapped it all up in an atomic user interface" elaborated Phil Gulliver, Delivery Lead, EMEA at Appnovation. 

John and the rest of the Appnovation team suggested implementing a modern architecture with a content solution like Contentful. And, although the company felt sure Contentful was up to the challenge, it began with a proof of concept just to be sure. The company launched small reports, validated their results and adjusted for the next release.

“Contentful allows us to have a clear model of the content structure that’s separate from the presentation. This allows us to reuse that content as needed. It really is a core component of the solution," noted Phil. While Storybook led the new website's frontend design, Contentful’s modularity and support for reuse streamlined the design process.

Why Contentful was the ideal platform

When it came time to turn the proof of concept into the final, global website, Fitch Ratings’s extensive library of published content made migration complexities a chief concern. Fortunately, Contentful’s API-first nature and cloud-based services help minimize migration time and keep costs low — a huge win in Appnovation and Fitch Ratings’s books.

“With a global team across London, New York and Chicago, Appnovation and Fitch Ratings’ tiger team jumped into gear as soon as the developers got the green light on their proof of concept. Working in two-week sprints they moved their old site over to Contentful,” said Phil, “The fact that it’s cloud-based made it much easier to work together.”

Throughout the re-engineering phase, Appnovation paid close attention to enhancing security, increasing delivery speed and streamlining information assimilation. Contentful made carrying out plans in each category seamless.

Supporting their editors now and in the future

The company’s newly designed platform offers seamless integration and can support increased content loads. Content editors on the frontline are able to publish new content directly to tagged output channels and those blocks of information are now interchangeable between the desired scenarios of any device: specific user interface, featured article, highlight, etc. 

“There’s a seamless transition between our marketing, research and editorial content,” said Param Rengaiah, director of web platforms at Fitch Ratings. “This really helps us curate our content and put it in front of the right audience at the right time.” 

With a lot of workflows in place, Fitch Ratings’s editors have never been more productive or organized. The clean, straightforward UI helps with this by offering concise project overviews. 

“You can reduce the components and as new needs are found for their pages and page templates, build on them. The ability to enrich designs and test out the UI and UX to ensure they’re working together is great,” shared Phil. “Another significant component is Elasticsearch - used to index content along with a GraphQL server. When customers come to the website, they need to find content fast.”

Contentful's modern architecture is paired with its App Framework, which integrates with tools that tackle everything from optimization and digital asset management to assigning tasks and checking workflows. “Contentful releases always include new features, and one thing I hear from their web app users is that it’s constantly adapting to their needs!” Phil said.

Measuring success since the new website rolled out

Shortly after launching their re-platformed site, the company began seeing positive results. Fitch saw SEO Improvements to the tune of 130%. Plus, data and user analytics became more accurate. There’s been an increase in newsletter sign-ups, an increase in efficiency on the publishing team and time to publish has shrunk. “We're seeing increased engagement on the site. The frequency of returning visitors is rising and the whole web experience is more enjoyable,” said Peter. 

The company plans to localize these components to advance Fitch’s marketing goals further. It will delegate a corner of the platform to a local office that can control what’s relevant to their region. “Contentful offers a solid foundation that we can build our future projects on,” Peter added. “It's a very scalable platform with a lot of flexibility regarding output channels.”

The Fitch Ratings website is a prime example of how a flexible tool like Contentful structured content into a component-based design allows a website to scale over time and easily pushes content to any device or channel.