Keystone-SDA

The Client

Keystone-SDA is not a media company in the traditional sense. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Founded in 1894 as the Swiss Telegraphic Agency and rebranded Keystone-SDA following its 2017 merger with the Swiss picture agency Keystone, it is Switzerland’s national full-service news agency a privately owned non-profit institution that supplies virtually every Swiss media outlet with verified, fact-based content across text, photography, video, audio, and infographics. Around the clock. 365 days a year. In three national languages: German, French, and Italian.

From 12 regional offices across the country, Keystone-SDA covers politics, economics, society, culture, science, and sport functioning as the baseline layer of journalistic supply that other reporting is built upon. In addition to domestic media, the agency supplies international news organisations. Its historical photo archive is considered a core element of Switzerland’s visual cultural memory.

The implications of that role are significant. When Keystone-SDA publishes, the rest of Swiss media moves. Speed, accuracy, and editorial governance are not abstract values they are operational requirements with direct consequences for the country’s media ecosystem. And by 2023, the internal systems behind those outputs had not kept pace.

The Challenge

A platform holding back an institution built on speed

Keystone-SDA’s publishing infrastructure was built on Salesforce as its data backbone, a solid foundation, but one buried behind a front-end UI that had long since become a liability. The interface their editorial and operational teams worked in every day was outdated, difficult to navigate, and unable to surface the data sitting in Salesforce in any meaningful or efficient way. By the time Incresco entered the picture, the friction was not in one catastrophic failure, but in a compounding pattern of workarounds that was slowing down one of the most time-sensitive editorial operations in the country.

The NP360 gap

NP360: Keystone-SDA’s vision for a modern multimedia, modular, and personalised publishing platform existed as an ambition. But the internal workflows feeding into it were not production-ready. Manual editorial processes, slow publishing cycles, and disconnected systems for managing News, Agenda, and Data content meant the platform’s potential was being undermined before content even reached it. What existed was fragmented.

The expert quotes problem

Expert Quotes is one of Keystone-SDA’s most commercially and editorially significant services connecting expert voices from organisations across Switzerland with the journalists who need them, distributed via NP360 with proactive email pushes to specialist journalists. But behind the scenes, the workflow powering it was chaotic.

Quotes arrived via email. They were stored in documents. Editorial validation happened informally, through manual edits and back-and-forth messages, with no structured review process, no feedback loop, and no audit trail. There was no way to know at any point which quotes had been reviewed, approved, or published, and by whom. For an agency whose editorial reputation rests on rigorous verification standards documented in a comprehensive internal handbook, this was a live risk on a live service.

The fundamental issue was not volume. It was architecture. Expert Quotes needed a governed workflow. What it had was a series of workarounds.

What the organisation actually needed

Keystone-SDA needed three things simultaneously: a governed, auditable process for expert content ingestion; a modern publishing environment with real-time capabilities, multilingual support, and personalisation; and an AI-ready foundation capable of growing into the features their team and subscribers were expecting next. What they did not need was another patchwork of tools added to a fragmented stack. They needed a system they actually owned and controlled.

The Approach

Fix the input before rebuilding the output

The instinct in most technology engagements is to go straight to the most visible problem. For Keystone-SDA, the most visible problem was NP360 an incomplete platform that needed rebuilding. Incresco did not start there.

The reason was diagnostic, not strategic theatre. NP360 is a publishing and distribution system. Its quality depends entirely on the quality of what flows into it. If the editorial input layer specifically, expert quote management remained ungoverned and chaotic, a rebuilt NP360 would merely distribute that chaos faster. The bottleneck was upstream.

Sequencing Phase 1 before Phase 2 was the most consequential decision of the engagement. It is also why the outcome of Phase 2 was possible.

What Incresco Built

Phase 1: Expert Quote Management Platform

Before a line of NP360 was rebuilt, Incresco designed and delivered a dedicated expert quote management platform replacing the email-and-document chaos with a structured, governed, auditable workflow.

Governance through architecture

The platform was built invite-only, with strict role-based access control from the start. Three roles Admin, Editor, Expert carry precisely defined permissions. Experts draft and submit. Editors review, provide structured feedback, and approve or return for revision. Admins govern the system. Nobody skips a stage. Nobody bypasses a review. The workflow enforces the standard that Keystone-SDA’s editorial reputation requires.

A structured pipeline that mirrors editorial reality

Every quote moves through a defined sequence: Draft, Review, Approval, Publish. Each transition is logged. Each feedback loop is structured. At any point, an editor can see exactly where every quote stands, who last touched it, and what was communicated. For an organisation running 24/7 that serves the entire Swiss media industry, that visibility is an operational requirement.

AI assistance at the point of input

Incresco integrated AI-assisted quote drafting into the Expert input layer. Experts provide their knowledge and perspective; the AI helps structure and articulate it into usable editorial form. This reduces back-and-forth between editorial staff and subject-matter experts, compresses time from input to publication-ready content, and raises the baseline quality of what enters the review stage.

Multilingual from the ground up

Switzerland’s linguistic reality German, French, Italian, and English is not an edge case for Keystone-SDA. It is the core of what the agency does. The Expert Quote platform was built with native four-language support (DE/FR/IT/EN), ensuring quotes can be submitted, reviewed, and published in the appropriate language without separate systems or manual coordination.

API-ready output

The platform was architected with downstream publishing in mind. Approved quotes are output in a structured, API-ready format designed to connect cleanly with NP360 and any future distribution infrastructure Keystone-SDA builds. The input layer and the publishing layer speak the same language.

Phase 2: NP360 Platform Revamp

With a governed, structured input pipeline in place, Incresco turned to NP360 itself rebuilding it as a modular, multi-tenant SaaS publishing platform designed around the full range of Keystone-SDA’s content and customer needs.

Unified, not fragmented

Keystone-SDA’s previous setup pulled data from Salesforce but surfaced it through a front-end that was narrow in scope, rigid in format, and increasingly unfit for a modern newsroom’s demands. NP360 was built to replace that entirely and serve as the single environment for everything: the News Module covering the full multimedia content feed with text, photos, video, audio, and infographics linked in context; the Agenda Module giving subscribers clear visibility into upcoming coverage and event planning; and the Data Module launched alongside Switzerland’s federal elections in October 2023 serving as the central hub for data journalism products. Three modules. One platform.

Real-time and personalised

Keystone-SDA’s subscribers: editors, journalists, and communication professionals across Swiss media need content the moment it exists, filtered to what matters to them. The rebuilt NP360 delivers that: real-time content retrieval, advanced search with customisable filter configurations, personalised dashboard views, and an alert system that pushes relevant content via email, push notification, or SMS. What was previously a static, one-size distribution is now a responsive, subscriber-tailored experience.

API-first architecture

Rather than building a closed platform, Incresco structured NP360 around an API-first architecture allowing downstream integrations, media partner systems, and future product extensions to connect without rebuilding the core. NP360 is an infrastructure asset, not just a product.

Mobile-ready and scalable

Keystone-SDA’s subscribers consume content across devices, deadlines, and contexts. The rebuilt platform was designed mobile-ready from the ground up. The underlying architecture is multi-tenant and built to serve a growing subscriber base without degradation in speed or reliability.

The AI foundation

Phase 2 also established the technical foundation for the AI capabilities that Keystone-SDA’s editorial team and product roadmap require next: automated content tagging, personalised recommendations, and AI-generated summaries. These are not features bolted on after the fact. They are architecturally anticipated the platform was designed to host them from the moment it was built.

Build Summary

Phase	What Incresco Built	What It Replaced
Phase 1	Expert Quote Management Platform invite-only RBAC (Admin/Editor/Expert), structured Draft→ Review→ Approval→ Publish workflow, AI-assisted drafting, 4-language support (DE/FR/IT/EN), API-ready output	Emails, documents, and manual edits no governance, no audit trail, no structured validation
Phase 2	NP360 Revamp: unified News, Agenda & Data modules; real-time search & filters; personalised dashboards; alert systems (email/push/SMS); API-first multi-tenant SaaS; AI foundation layer	Outdated Salesforce front-end UI: single-format, non-personalised, unable to surface data effectively for editorial teams

Before and After

Area	Before Incresco	After Incresco
Expert quote handling	Scattered emails, docs, manual edits, no traceability	Governed platform: Draft → Review → Approve → Publish
Publishing speed	Slow manual cycles; bottlenecks at every handoff	Structured automated workflow; real-time output
Editorial control	Limited: informal, role-undefined	Full RBAC: Admin, Editor, Expert roles enforced
Content access	Outdated Salesforce UI: rigid, non-searchable, unable to surface data meaningfully	NP360: real-time search, filters, personalised dashboards
Multilingual delivery	Ad hoc coordination	Native DE/FR/IT/EN baked into workflow
AI integration	None	AI-assisted drafting; foundation for tagging, recommendations, summaries
Audit trail	No log of who approved what, when	Full audit trail at every workflow stage
Scalability	Patchwork tools that fragmented under demand	API-first multi-tenant SaaS — built to scale

The Outcome

A publishing engine that Keystone-SDA owns and controls

The transformation Incresco delivered is most visible in what no longer exists. The email threads that carried expert inputs have been replaced by a governed platform. The manual edits that passed for editorial review have been replaced by a structured, logged, role-enforced workflow. The outdated Salesforce front-end that obscured data from the teams who needed it has been replaced by NP360: a modern, multimedia, personalised environment that surfaces information clearly and serves Keystone-SDA’s subscribers the way they actually need to be served.

Zero chaos in expert quote handling

The Expert Quote system did not merely improve the workflow. It replaced the chaos entirely. Every quote now has a documented life: who submitted it, who reviewed it, what feedback was given, when it was approved, when it was published. That level of auditability is not just operationally useful for an organisation whose editorial credibility is its core asset, it is existentially important.

Publishing speed: manual to structured

The shift from manual publishing cycles to structured automated workflow compresses cycle time at every stage. Editorial staff who previously spent time chasing inputs, cross-checking versions, and manually routing approvals now operate within a system where that overhead is gone. The pipeline runs. The team focuses on editorial judgement, not administrative friction.

Full editorial control with audit trails

Role-based access control means that what people can do in the system matches what their role actually requires. Admins govern. Editors validate. Experts contribute. No one bypasses a stage. No one operates in the dark. Every action is logged. For a national news agency with regulatory and ethical obligations that are documented in its own internal standards handbook, that architecture of accountability was not optional it was the baseline.

A unified platform replacing fragmented legacy systems

NP360 now serves as the single environment for all of Keystone-SDA’s publishing. News, Agenda, and Data previously managed across disconnected tools now exist in one modular, coherent system. Subscribers access everything through one portal, with personalised dashboards and alert configurations that match their workflow, not a generic template.

A scalable foundation for AI-driven publishing

The Expert Quote platform and the rebuilt NP360 are not the final state. They are the foundation. The API-first architecture, the structured content objects, and the modular build mean that content tagging, recommendations, and AI-assisted summaries are already achievable extensions not future rebuilds. Keystone-SDA’s product roadmap now has a platform capable of delivering on it.

Incresco did not jump to the most visible problem. They diagnosed what was actually broken and fixed it in the right order. That sequencing is what made the platform transformation possible.

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Services Delivered: Editorial Workflow Audit & Architecture · Expert Quote Platform (RBAC, AI Drafting, 4 Languages) · NP360 Modular Publishing Platform Rebuild · Multi-tenant SaaS Architecture & API-first Design · Multilingual Content Infrastructure (DE/FR/IT/EN) · Real-time Search, Personalised Dashboards & Alerts · AI Foundation Layer (Tagging, Recommendations, Summaries) · Legacy UI Replacement & NP360 Platform Migration