About Bizportal

Bizportal

Bizportal is a Hebrew-language financial news portal based in Tel Aviv, in the Tel Aviv District of Israel, and it holds a specific place in the country's internet history: it is described by its partners as Israel's first online financial portal. Established in 1995 as a web-based repository for financial reports, Bizportal grew from that document archive into the leading Israeli website in the field of capital markets, publishing commentary, news and ongoing financial analysis from Israel and around the world on capital markets, the economy, real estate and consumer finance. For Israeli investors who read in Hebrew, it is one of the daily instruments of the market, sitting alongside the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's own data in the working day of brokers, analysts and private traders.

A financial portal is a different kind of news organisation from a newspaper. Its readers come not only to read but to check: prices, indices, portfolios, fund comparisons and the news that moves them, all in one place and updated through the trading day. Bizportal's history — beginning with financial reports, the raw filings on which investment decisions depend — explains its character. It started as data, and journalism grew around the data.

Established in 1995 as a financial repository

The Outbrain case study of Bizportal records the founding facts plainly: Bizportal is Israel's first online financial portal, established in 1995 as a web-based repository for financial reports, and it has since developed and grown in scope. In 1995 the commercial web was in its first year in Israel, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange was still associated in the public mind with a physical trading floor culture, and putting company financial reports online was a genuinely new service. A repository sounds modest, but for investors it solved a real problem: access to the reports of listed companies, quickly and in one place.

From that base, the site specialised in economics, business and finance, and the same case study describes it today as the leading website in Israel in the field of capital markets. The website regularly publishes commentary, news and ongoing financial analyses from Israel and around the world in the areas of capital markets, the economy, real estate and consumer finance — a remit that takes it from Tel Aviv trading to Wall Street, from interest-rate decisions to the price of an apartment and the state of a pension.

Owned by Trendline of Tel Aviv

Bizportal is operated by Trendline Information and Communication Services Ltd, an Israeli company founded in 1981 and based in Tel Aviv, whose shares are traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Company descriptions of Trendline describe its core product directly: it operates Bizportal, a financial site that provides various tools and information for investors to make economic decisions in the capital market. Trendline's own history predates the web by more than a decade, in financial information services — the business of collecting, organising and selling market and company information to business users — and Bizportal is the consumer-facing, public expression of that business on the internet.

Globes, Israel's business newspaper, identified Trendline in 2013 as the owner of Bizportal, Ice and Takdin, when it reported Trendline's acquisition of the internet activity of Tapuz People for 4.3 million shekels. The same stable explains the division of labour in the group: Bizportal for finance and investors, Ice for media and advertising, Takdin for legal information — three professional information markets, each with a specialist site, under one Tel Aviv information company.

Tools and information for investors

The investor tools around Bizportal's journalism are extensive. Company descriptions of Trendline list the portal's services in the areas of real estate, options, bonds, exchange-traded funds, mutual funds, provident funds, overseas markets, Wall Street and market conditions of indices, together with BizTV and Bizmobile. In plain terms, a Bizportal user can follow Tel Aviv shares and indices, compare the mutual and provident funds in which much of Israel's long-term savings is invested, check bonds and options, watch financial video and follow overseas markets that affect Israeli portfolios, especially in the United States.

Trendline also offers Bizportal software solutions, described as including a stock-exchange graph and signal system, customer-relationship management, digital invoicing, portfolio management and trading services. That software side underlines the portal's double nature: it is a publication that professionals read and a platform that professionals and investors use, and the two sides reinforce each other, because tools bring users back daily and journalism gives them something to act on.

News, analysis and recommendations

Bizportal's publishing remit, as described in company summaries, covers current economic and business news in the capital and real-estate markets, current macroeconomic and economic developments, and forecasts and economic trends, as well as analyses, reviews and recommendations for the purchase and sale of securities. This is the full agenda of a financial newsroom: market reports through the day, company results and announcements, macroeconomic data such as inflation, interest rates and employment, property-market news, and the analyst commentary through which Israeli investors interpret all of it.

The portal's subject list in directory listings — the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, markets, pensions and personal finance — points to the two audiences that meet on the site. Professional and active investors follow trading; the far larger public of savers follows the parts of the market where their own money sits, above all pensions and provident funds, which in Israel are invested heavily in the capital markets and whose performance is therefore household news. A portal that serves both audiences translates between them: market language for traders, consumer finance for savers, on the same homepage.

The market Bizportal reports: Tel Aviv

The exchange at the centre of Bizportal's world is the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, Israel's only stock exchange, in the same city as the portal. Securities trading in Israel began with an Exchange Bureau for Securities founded by the Anglo-Palestine Bank in 1935, and the formal stock exchange was incorporated and began operations in Tel Aviv in 1953, after the founding of the state created the need to organise trade. The exchange plays a major role in the Israeli economy as its only public market for trading securities, listing companies alongside government and corporate bonds, exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, and operating under the supervision of the Israel Securities Authority.

For a Hebrew financial portal, that single-exchange structure is a strength. The whole listed universe of a national economy — its banks, insurers, property companies, technology firms and government debt — trades in one market, in one language and in one time zone, and a specialist site can cover it comprehensively day by day. Bizportal's capital-markets leadership claim rests on that comprehensiveness: the filings it began with in 1995, the prices and tools that followed, and the newsroom that explains them.

Bizportal and its commercial partnerships

Bizportal's own business development offers a glimpse of how established Israeli portals earn their living. In a published case study, the content-recommendation company Outbrain described its long-term partnership with Bizportal, providing personalised content recommendations intended to improve the user experience and increase site revenue, using a tool that customises which recommended content each visitor sees. Bizportal's owner Avishai Ovadia was quoted welcoming the partnership and the innovation it brought, saying it had driven a significant increase in site revenue and a definite enhancement to the user experience while preserving the site's look and feel.

The episode is worth recording because it shows the commercial reality of Israeli online publishing: even a leading specialist portal monetises through advertising technology and audience recommendation systems, balancing the needs of investors who want fast, clean data against the economics of free, advertising-funded news. Bizportal adopted personalisation tools while insisting the portal's established character remain intact for its regular users.

Real estate, pensions and personal finance

Three of Bizportal's coverage areas deserve separate attention because they connect the capital market to everyday Israeli life. Real estate is both an asset class traded through listed property companies and bonds, and the dominant household concern in a country with high housing prices; Bizportal covers it as market news and as consumer news. Pensions and provident funds are the channel through which most Israelis own market assets at all, so fund performance, fee and regulation news on the portal is read as personal finance, not abstraction. And consumer finance — banking, credit, savings and the cost of living — gives the portal a general business-news readership beyond active traders.

Directory listings of Israeli business outlets consistently place Bizportal among the country's business and technology news sources for exactly this mixture: a trading tool, a markets newsroom and a personal-finance publication in a single Hebrew site.

A 1995 survivor of the first web

Very few websites founded in 1995 remain leading publications in their fields. Bizportal's survival rests on the order in which it built itself: a useful repository first, in a market where the underlying documents were hard to get; then tools that made it a daily habit for investors; then a newsroom whose commentary and analysis gave those investors interpretation as well as data. Each layer was added to a service professionals already used, rather than launched in search of an audience.

Its ownership reinforces the continuity. Trendline was in the information business from 1981, fourteen years before Bizportal existed, and brought to the web an existing understanding of what business users pay for: accuracy, speed and organisation of financial information. The portal is that pre-internet information business, translated into a public website and grown, over three decades, into Israel's best-known capital-markets address in Hebrew.

Place in the Israeli news landscape

Israel's financial journalism in Hebrew is led by the business newspapers and their websites, which cover the whole economy and polity, and by specialist portals, of which Bizportal is the longest-established. Where a business newspaper leads with interpretation and investigation, Bizportal leads with the market itself: prices, tools, filings and the continuous flow of trading news, supplemented by analysis and recommendations. The two forms coexist because investors need both, often on the same screen, in the same morning.

From its Tel Aviv base, in the Tel Aviv District a short distance from the exchange it covers, Bizportal remains what its 1995 founders built and its subsequent owners expanded: Israel's first online financial portal, and the place where the country's capital markets have been published, in Hebrew, since the web began.