New Economic School joins Interfax's Universities Program

New Economic School will use Interfax's information and analytical systems in its educational and research process.

The Interfax Group and New Economic School (NES) have signed an agreement to integrate Interfax's IT systems into the NES educational and research process.

NES teaching staff and students will have the opportunity to use the Group's information and analytical systems in applied research.

NES is one of the first participants of Interfax's Universities Program "Digital Technologies for Education and Science" and will integrate data from SPARK-Interfax into its own information system. The SPARK Application Programming Interface will provide researchers with fundamentally new opportunities to work with Big Data about the Russian economy.

NES students and academic staff will have access to SPARK's archive going back more than 15 years and containing information about all businesses in Russia and some CIS countries. The data are aggregated from more than 100 sources, including company reports, tenders, court proceedings, intellectual property and much more.

"We hold our partnership with NES, one of our country's leading institutes for economics, in very high regard. We hope that Interfax's products will assist with the professional growth of Russian economists and provide a tool to develop the cutting-edge research projects that our society, state and businesses need," said Interfax CEO Mikhail Komissar.

"Economic research is one of the key elements of the New Economic School's Mission. It is not possible to conduct this research without access to data, and the more complete and the better the data are, the more useful and interesting will be the research we can perform for the goods of society as a whole. Collaboration with Interfax opens up major opportunities for us in this regard. Interfax's information systems will be a valuable resource for the School's professors and students in their research and studies," said Ruben Enikolopov, NES Rector.

"The extent of the archive and the SPARK system's range of unique analytical indicators like the Due Diligence Index and Payment Discipline Index make research in the most diverse fields of the economy's various sectors possible," said Ilya Munerman, Director, Interfax LAB Research Center.

NES professors have immediate plans to use SPARK for their research, for example to assess the impact of sanctions on the productivity of Russian companies in the short- and medium term.

The NES also plans to use the SCAN-Interfax system for research that involves analyzing the media and media archives, for example to evaluate the impact of the news environment on oil price trends or how information about new government measures influences decisions by families to have children in various regions of the country.

The academic research collaboration between Interfax and the NES is the continuation of many years of successful relations between the two in the field of education. Ilya Munerman himself gives a machine learning course at the NES. Aided by Interfax products, post-graduate students learn Big Data processing skills using machine learning methods, scoring and other applied tasks. Dissertations have included research of the franchise market, a financial market index has been tested and other research involving transactional data is carried out.

The New Economic School is an independent higher education and research institute that was established in 1992. Its mission is to benefit Russia's private and public sectors through excellence in economics education and research. The quality of education at NES relies on strong faculty of Russian and foreign professors with PhDs from the world's leading universities. NES is a leader among Russian universities in terms of the number of publications in leading international journals on economics, econometrics and finance. Details at www.nes.ru

Over the past 30 years, the Interfax Group has been developing information and analytical systems to analyze the business activity of companies, to manage credit and tax risks, conduct media monitoring and to learn how to work with Big Data. Applying these skills and knowledge for the development of education and science is an important aspect of a company's social responsibility.

Interfax works closely with leading Russian higher educational institutes and helps them to integrate unique databases and IT solutions into the educational process in order to train professionals with essential practical skills that are highly sought after on the labor market.