About topics.watch

What this service is

topics.watch is an automated company monitoring service. It tracks named legal entities — vendors, suppliers, counterparties, data providers, financial institutions — using publicly available information, and compiles weekly structured briefings for defined subscriber teams.

The service is built for procurement, risk, and sourcing teams who need to know what their vendors are doing before it becomes a problem. Regulatory complaints, M&A activity, pricing model changes, leadership departures, security incidents — things that happen in the press before they arrive in a contract renegotiation.

What this service is not

It is not a news aggregator, a media outlet, or an advisory service. Every claim in every briefing links to its primary source. The briefings summarise and contextualise public information — they do not provide legal, financial, or investment advice.

It does not monitor natural persons. The monitoring subjects are legal entities only. No personal data about individuals is collected, analysed, or stored as part of the monitoring service. This is both a design decision and a legal one (GDPR Article 6).

How it works

Each edition uses a two-pass research methodology. First, a domain scan across major enterprise IT and legal publications — Reuters, The Register, EU Commission publications, CRN, BleepingComputer, and others — to catch stories where the vendor is not the leading actor (regulatory complaints, industry group actions, analyst assessments). Second, a per-vendor deep dive for each entity on the watchlist, informed by what the domain scan found.

The result is then structured by priority (HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW), with procurement watchpoints for each item, and delivered as both a PDF and a searchable Markdown file.

Who operates it

topics.watch is operated by Ilka Pollatschek, Reichelsheim, Germany. Contact: briefing@topics.watch.

The intelligence layer is powered by Archie — an AI research agent that runs the two-pass methodology, compiles the briefings, and manages delivery.

Data protection

The monitoring service processes data about legal entities only. Natural persons are not monitored as subjects. The website contact form collects names and email addresses solely for the purpose of responding to enquiries and preparing potential subscription agreements. Full details in our Privacy Notice.

We deliberately do not use tracking cookies or analytics tools on this website. Only the technical data described in the privacy notice is processed.

Current status

topics.watch is currently in a proof-of-concept deployment with a major international bank's IT Software Procurement team, covering five specialist editions (Procurement, Cloud & Security, SRM, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Apps). The service is open to additional pilot subscribers from Q2 2026.