In order to get around my own laziness I built a bot to go and fetch all the Fintech news worthy of reading. FintechBot is a very simple Twitter bot that collects fintech news stories and tweets them for the world to see. It has saved me time and it seems to be fairly popular with other lazy fintech newshounds (Around 1400 followers at the time of writing).

It feeds its daily output to this blog and there is also a daily email that you can subscribe to.

How it was built?

It really is a very simple thing. It was inspired by my colleague Richard who built an NFC Banking bot and a wildly successful Future Lighting bot (lots of lamp nerds out there). He chose to power them using Google Alerts and a mixture of trusted sources. I collated a set of trusted tech and financial news sites (a list of which can be found here). I then took the RSS feeds from those sites or elements of them e.g. just a blogging section of a news site, and added those as fuel to an auto tweeting service. At the time of creation (just under 3 years ago) there were two notable services for autofeeding a Twitter account, Twitterfeed and Dlvr.it.

For more detail then you can read the full post on how it was made and what I would like to do with it in the future here