Scout Asia
ScoutAsia, the Asia-focused company data platform from Nikkei and the Financial Times, had world-class data behind a login and no marketing site to turn sceptical analysts into trial signups. We built it, and Nikkei came back in 2024 to relaunch it.
A WordPress marketing and campaign platform for ScoutAsia, built to convert portfolio managers and researchers into trial users, still live on our build after a 2024 relaunch.
What we were solving
ScoutAsia is a serious product with serious parentage. Developed by Nikkei and the Financial Times in 2018, it gives portfolio managers, researchers and corporate planners one place to monitor companies and detect risk across Asia, drawing on millions of company records and thousands of daily news articles. In 2019, Singapore's Handshakes by DC Frontiers came on board to power the platform with its AI.
All of that lived behind a login. What ScoutAsia lacked was the public-facing layer: a website that could explain the product to a time-poor analyst, carry the weight of the Nikkei and FT names, and convert interest into trial signups. The brief was a lead-generation machine, with an urgent first target attached: a campaign aimed at a few hundred portfolio managers.
The buyers made the job harder. ScoutAsia's customers are professional sceptics, and assessing the reliability of information is their day job. A site with inflated claims or a confusing trial path would fail with this audience faster than any other.
How we tackled it
Sell the trust before the technology
Chillybin didn't build the data platform. Our job was the marketing site around it and the positioning that came first. The site had to convey three things, in the client's words: authenticity, diversity and simplicity. So every page leads with the sources and the people (news curated by Nikkei, AI from Handshakes, a human machine-learning team, Connections+ for data visualisation) rather than feature lists. We worked inside ScoutAsia's identity guidelines, issued mid-project in 2020, so the site sat naturally alongside everything else Nikkei publishes.
One goal per page
The information architecture came from how the customers work, not how the product is organised. Solutions pages mapped to the five buyer roles (portfolio management, due diligence, business development, strategic planning, investment research), each a path to the same destination: the trial form. Clicking "Sign Up For Trial" pre-filled the enquiry type so nobody answered the same question twice, and submissions pushed into Salesforce so leads reached the sales team with context attached. For the portfolio manager push we built a single-purpose campaign landing page with the trial form doing the work.
A stack the client's team could run
We built on WordPress with Beaver Builder, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Gravity Forms and WP Rocket, hosted on WP Engine behind Cloudflare. Nothing exotic, deliberately. A platform company doesn't want its marketing site to become a second engineering project, and this stack meant Nikkei's own team could publish insights, press coverage and campaign pages without a developer. We redirected the legacy pages so search equity carried over, and handed Nikkei a full owner's manual.
What we delivered
ScoutAsia now runs its events and campaigns from go.scout.asia, the site Nikkei asked us to relaunch in 2024, still on the WordPress foundation we handed over. Product marketing has consolidated onto Nikkei's main scout.asia site. The relationship outlasted the launch by four years.
The platform itself has kept growing. ScoutAsia today advertises 5.5 million+ company records, 5,000+ daily news articles and 100+ media sources (figures published on scout.asia). Our part is narrower: the lead-generation layer around a flagship Asia data product, built once and commissioned twice.
What we learned
Enterprise clients buy differently, and the website has to respect that. A ScoutAsia visitor was never going to impulse-buy. The realistic conversion was a trial request from someone mid-evaluation. Feeding every page into one form, wired into Salesforce rather than an inbox, made the site a sales asset instead of a brochure.
Working with a joint venture means working with three brands at once. Nikkei, the FT and Handshakes each brought equity worth borrowing and guidelines worth following, and the identity documents arrived mid-build. A design system built to absorb that kept the project moving.
