Modular Finance vs. Distill: which tool is right for your team?
Staying informed about companies in your market usually forces a difficult choice. On one side are specialized capital markets platforms built for listed company investor relations and finance teams. On the other side are basic keyword alerts and RSS feeds that flood your inbox with duplicate press releases, clickbait, and irrelevant noise.
Distill takes a different approach. It gives corporate strategy, investment, product, and sales teams an automated way to monitor any public or private company across the globe without the noise. Distill tracks news coverage, press releases, corporate blogs, and official LinkedIn posts, bundles duplicate stories covering the same event into a single update, and delivers clean bullet-point summaries directly into Slack, Microsoft Teams, or scheduled email digests.
In this guide, we compare Modular Finance and Distill. Modular Finance is a market leader for Nordic and UK investor relations, shareholder data, and regulatory compliance. Distill is an automated company monitoring tool designed to track real-world competitor movements, private startups, and market shifts. We will break down their coverage, features, daily workflows, and pricing so you can choose the best tool for your team.
What makes a great company monitoring tool?
Before looking at individual features, it helps to understand what modern teams actually need from an intelligence tool. The right software depends on whether you manage capital markets obligations for a public company or track competitive moves across the broader business landscape.
When evaluating platforms in this category, we focus on four practical capabilities:
- Company coverage breadth: A useful platform must track the businesses that directly impact your strategy, whether they are listed corporations, venture-backed startups, or private competitors.
- Direct-channel source tracking: Strategic company moves rarely happen only in stock exchange filings. The system must monitor corporate blogs, newsroom subpages, and official LinkedIn posts where companies announce product launches and partnerships first.
- Noise reduction and story bundling: When ten different publications cover the exact same press release or announcement, the software should group them into one card with key takeaways instead of sending ten separate alerts.
- Ambient team delivery: Market intelligence should reach your team where work already happens, including Slack channels, Microsoft Teams, and email briefings, without requiring daily logins to a separate portal.
Modular Finance and Distill at a glance
What is Modular Finance?
Modular Finance is a Stockholm-based financial technology company founded in 2014. It develops software and data platforms specifically for investor relations (IR) teams, corporate issuers, and capital markets professionals in the Nordics and the United Kingdom. Its product ecosystem includes Holdings (shareholder register analysis, fund ownership, short selling, and insider trades), Monitor (an IR CRM and investor targeting platform), MFN (a regulated news distribution service and FCA-approved Primary Information Provider), Strictlog (Market Abuse Regulation compliance for insider lists), and Estimates (analyst consensus management). It is engineered to help listed companies manage statutory disclosures, track institutional share ownership, and communicate with the financial community.
What is Distill?
Distill is an AI-powered corporate monitoring and market intelligence platform. It tracks any company in the world that has a website, from five-person startups to global corporations. Distill monitors the entire public footprint of a company, including global business news, trade publications, official company blogs, newsroom subpages, Substack, Medium, and official company LinkedIn posts. It uses automated filtering to eliminate irrelevant matches and marketing spam, and it bundles multi-source coverage of the same event into a single update card with bullet-point summaries. Teams receive updates through instant Slack or Teams notifications, scheduled daily or weekly email digests, or a live web dashboard.
TL;DR: Modular Finance vs. Distill
| Feature / Dimension | Modular Finance | Distill | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Listed company IR teams, CFOs, and capital markets brokers tracking ownership and regulatory filings | Corporate strategy, investment, sales, and product teams tracking competitors, private firms, and market shifts | Depends on use case (Modular Finance for IR; Distill for company monitoring) |
| Target company scope | Nordic and UK publicly listed equities | Any company worldwide with a website (private or public) | Distill |
| Monitored sources | Share registers, regulatory filings, stock exchange disclosures, and analyst consensus | Global news, trade publications, official blogs, company newsrooms, Substack, and official LinkedIn posts | Distill |
| Setup and onboarding | Sales demos, procurement, and guided enterprise setup | Under 2 minutes (Instant self-serve) | Distill |
| Noise reduction | Structured financial records and regulatory feeds (manual review) | Automated story bundling, marketing filters, and newsworthiness classification | Distill |
| Foreign-language translation | Swedish and English regulatory filings; local financial disclosures | Automatic translation of foreign local news into English summaries | Distill |
| Delivery channels | Web platform, email alerts, dedicated mobile app, and API add-ons | Slack, Microsoft Teams, daily/weekly email digests, web dashboard, and PDF export | Distill |
| Pricing model | Custom annual enterprise contracts per product module | Starts at $59/month (Cancel anytime) | Distill |
| Free trial | No self-serve trial (requires booking a demo) | 14-day full free trial (No credit card required) | Distill |
Key feature differences
1. Company coverage: private startups and global competitors vs. public equities
To understand your competitive landscape, you need to track both established market leaders and fast-moving private entrants. In many industries, the most disruptive competitors are venture-backed startups and private mid-market firms.
With Modular Finance: The platform is engineered specifically for listed equities, primarily across Sweden, the broader Nordic region, and the United Kingdom. Its flagship products, such as Holdings and Monitor, rely on statutory share registers, custodian banks, and regulatory reporting. While it provides peerless accuracy for institutional shareholdings and fund allocations, it is not built to monitor private technology startups, unlisted competitors, or international vendors that operate outside public stock markets.
With Distill: Distill tracks any company that has an active website. You can monitor an early-stage startup in London, a private manufacturing competitor in Germany, or an enterprise giant in the United States. Distill also automatically translates local news from languages like Swedish, German, Japanese, and Portuguese into concise English summaries, ensuring regional expansions and local developments never slip past your radar.
Winner: Distill: It monitors any company worldwide, whether private, venture-backed, or publicly traded.
2. Monitored channels: corporate blogs and LinkedIn vs. regulatory filings
Companies do not wait for quarterly regulatory filings to share operational news. Product launches, strategic partnerships, customer case studies, and key executive appointments are published first on corporate blogs, newsroom pages, and official LinkedIn posts.
With Modular Finance: Modular Finance focuses on formal capital markets channels. Its MFN product is a regulated information service designed to distribute stock exchange announcements, regulatory press releases, and financial reports directly to financial media and trading terminals. It is built to satisfy regulatory mandates like the EU Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). However, it does not crawl corporate digital footprints, company blogs, or official LinkedIn accounts where everyday operational news happens.
With Distill: Distill tracks the channels where real-world business decisions are shared. Beyond mainstream business news and industry trade publications, Distill directly monitors official company blogs, press release pages, Medium, Substack, and official company LinkedIn posts. If a competitor quietly introduces a new feature on their blog or highlights a major customer win on LinkedIn, Distill captures and summarizes the update immediately.
Winner: Distill: It ingests first-party digital channels and social posts that capital markets platforms ignore.
3. Noise reduction: automated story bundling vs. manual document review
Staying updated should not mean spending an hour every morning sifting through identical press releases, syndicated wire reports, and promotional articles.
With Modular Finance: Modular Finance provides clean, structured data for financial metrics, insider transactions, and shareholder tables. For investor relations workflows, this structure is valuable. But when following market developments, users must still open individual regulatory filings, read full press releases, and manually assess whether an announcement has strategic relevance for their business.
With Distill: Distill solves information overload with a three-part filtering system. First, it eliminates name confusion, making sure you only see news about the exact company you follow. Second, it filters out routine promotional marketing and generic product reviews, classifying updates by newsworthiness so routine content does not clutter your feed. Third, when multiple media outlets report on the same announcement, Distill bundles them into a single update card with bullet-point takeaways.
Winner: Distill: It eliminates repetitive wire articles and extracts key takeaways automatically.
Use case fit: who should choose which tool?
Modular Finance
Modular Finance is the standard choice for listed company investor relations officers, CFOs, corporate secretarial teams, and capital markets brokers in the Nordics and the UK. It is built for teams whose primary responsibilities include:
- Shareholder intelligence: Analyzing institutional share ownership, monitoring changes in top fund holdings, and tracking short selling positions via Holdings.
- Investor targeting and roadshows: Managing investor interactions, organizing roadshow itineraries, and identifying potential new institutional shareholders through Monitor.
- Regulatory press release distribution: Distributing mandatory regulatory news and financial reports through an FCA-approved Primary Information Provider (MFN).
- Insider list compliance: Managing insider logbooks and fulfilling Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) requirements with Strictlog.
- Analyst consensus management: Collecting, aggregating, and publishing analyst consensus estimates using Estimates.
Distill Intelligence
Distill is engineered for commercial teams, corporate strategy leaders, and investors who need continuous operational awareness of competitors, customers, and market trends. It is the optimal choice for:
- Corporate strategy and market intelligence: Tracking competitor product releases, executive hires, strategic partnerships, and regional expansions across both private and public firms.
- Venture capital and private equity: Following portfolio companies, competitors, and deal pipeline targets between funding rounds without waiting for lagging financial reports.
- B2B sales and business development: Capturing timely business triggers, such as leadership changes or new client announcements, to start relevant sales conversations.
- Product and engineering teams: Monitoring competitor product blogs, technical announcements, and official LinkedIn posts to stay ahead of industry direction.
Pricing comparison
| Plan details | Modular Finance | Distill |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Custom enterprise quotes (annual contracts per product module) | Starts at $59/month (Pay monthly or annually) |
| Setup and onboarding fees | Custom implementation and onboarding fees depending on package | $0 |
| Free trial | Available on request after a scheduled sales demo | 14-day full free trial |
| Credit card required? | Requires formal sales contract and invoicing | No credit card required with a work email |
| Contract flexibility | Annual commitments standard | Cancel or modify anytime |
The pricing models reflect the different audiences of each tool. Modular Finance operates on a traditional enterprise capital markets model. Products like Holdings, Monitor, MFN, and Strictlog are priced separately or bundled in annual agreements tailored to the market capitalization and compliance requirements of listed corporations. Getting started requires booking a product demo with their sales team and entering an annual contract.
Distill uses a transparent, self-serve SaaS model. Plans start at $59/month with the option to pay monthly or annually. Any team can test the software with a 14-day free trial using a work email, without speaking to a sales representative or entering payment details.
Who should use which tool?
Choose Modular Finance if:
- You manage investor relations or corporate communications for a publicly listed company in the Nordics or the United Kingdom.
- You need detailed insight into institutional fund ownership, custodian bank breakdowns, and short interest data.
- You must distribute regulatory press releases through an FCA-approved Primary Information Provider (PIP).
- You need an integrated insider logbook to comply with EU Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) standards.
Choose Distill if:
- You need to track private companies: You want to monitor venture-backed startups, mid-market competitors, and private vendors alongside public firms.
- You want to monitor LinkedIn and corporate blogs: You care about product announcements, thought leadership, and executive hires that never appear in formal regulatory filings.
- You want noise-free updates: You want automated story bundling that groups duplicate news articles into a single card with bullet-point takeaways.
- You want alerts where you work: You prefer updates sent directly into Slack channels, Microsoft Teams, or scheduled email digests instead of checking a separate workstation.
- You need quick setup and transparent pricing: You want to start tracking your market in two minutes without sales calls, implementation fees, or annual lock-in.
Strengths and where friction shows up
Where Modular Finance performs well
- Exceptional shareholder data: Holdings and Monitor offer some of the most granular, verified ownership registries available for Nordic and UK listed companies.
- Integrated capital markets compliance: Combining regulatory distribution (MFN) with insider management (Strictlog) provides listed issuers with an efficient, reliable compliance workflow.
- Strong reputation and support: Over 1,000 listed issuers and major financial institutions rely on Modular Finance, supported by responsive, specialized customer service teams.
Where friction shows up with Modular Finance
- Blind to private companies: Because it is built around public equity filings and registers, it cannot track early-stage startups or private competitors.
- Ignores informal company communication: It does not track corporate blogs, newsroom pages, Substack, or official LinkedIn posts where commercial moves are announced.
- Sales-gated procurement: Testing or deploying the software requires scheduled demonstrations, sales quotes, and annual contracts.
- Narrow focus on financial and IR roles: The interface and data model are tailored to IR professionals and equity analysts, making it ill-suited for corporate strategy, product management, or sales prospecting.
Frequently asked questions
Q1: Can Distill replace Modular Finance?
No, Distill is not a direct replacement for Modular Finance because they solve different operational problems. Modular Finance is a capital markets platform built for listed companies to manage investor relations, shareholder registers, and regulatory compliance. Distill is an automated company monitoring tool designed for corporate strategy, investment, and sales teams to follow competitor movements, private startups, and industry news across the web and LinkedIn. If you need statutory IR tools, you need Modular Finance; if you need automated market intelligence, Distill is the better choice.
Q2: What sources does Distill monitor that Modular Finance misses?
Distill monitors official company blogs, newsroom subpages, corporate press release pages, Medium, Substack, and official company LinkedIn posts, alongside global business news outlets and trade publications. Modular Finance concentrates on stock exchange filings, regulatory disclosures, shareholder registers, and analyst consensus estimates. Distill also automatically translates local foreign-language news into English summaries.
Q3: How does Distill filter out duplicate news and PR noise?
Distill uses a three-step filtering process: first, it disambiguates company names to eliminate irrelevant matches; second, it filters out routine promotional marketing posts and generic product reviews; third, when multiple news outlets report on the same announcement, it bundles them into a single update card with bullet-point takeaways.
Q4: Can I track private companies and early-stage startups with Distill?
Yes, Distill tracks any company in the world as long as it has a website. Unlike Modular Finance, which focuses almost exclusively on publicly traded equities in the Nordics and the UK, Distill monitors private startups, mid-market businesses, and international competitors equally well.
Q5: Is there a free trial, and do I need a credit card?
Yes. Distill offers a 14-day free trial with full access to all features. If you sign up using your work email, no credit card is required. You can set up your company watchlist and configure your Slack, Teams, or email alerts in less than two minutes.
Final verdict
| Use case / Need | Best choice |
|---|---|
| Nordic and UK listed company IR, shareholder registers, and MAR compliance | Modular Finance |
| Tracking private startups, unlisted competitors, and portfolio companies | Distill |
| Monitoring company blogs, newsrooms, and official LinkedIn posts | Distill |
| Automated noise reduction and multi-source story bundling | Distill |
| Direct push delivery to Slack channels, Microsoft Teams, and email digests | Distill |
| Fast self-serve setup with transparent monthly pricing | Distill |
Modular Finance is an outstanding software suite for its intended audience. For listed company CFOs, investor relations directors, and institutional brokers operating in the Nordic and UK capital markets, products like Holdings, Monitor, and MFN provide specialized data and compliance tools that general business software cannot match.
However, for teams that need to monitor the broader market, track private competitors, or follow company moves across blogs and LinkedIn, Modular Finance is not the right tool. Distill gives corporate strategy, investment, sales, and product teams an automated, noise-free way to stay ahead of any business in the world, with instant setup and alerts delivered directly to where your team already works.
To see how it works for your market, you can start a 14-day free trial of Distill in under two minutes (no credit card required with a work email).