About

FT Labs is a small team at the Financial Times, striving to reach and engage readers with the world’s finest journalism, by looking for gaps, opportunities, concerns, and the unknown.

We are helping prepare for new technologies, ideas, and behaviours, which might help or hinder.

Along the way we are looking to create and take advantage of collaborations between teams within the FT as well as externally.

You can catch up with us virtually on Twitter and GitHub.

Some history

The Financial Times is an English-language daily newspaper, founded in 1888 (here’s a nice pictorial timeline).

In January 2012, Assanka, the web and application development company acquired by the Financial Times, was officially rebranded as FT Labs.

From 2012 to 2015, pieces of this original FT Labs group split off into separate products and teams, merging into the larger FT organisation. These include:

Since January 2015, FT Labs (2.0) been the small R&D team within the FT as described above, rising from the ashes of the former inhabitants of the brand name.

Since July 2015, after a long stint as part of Pearson, the FT has been part of Nikkei, a Japanese financial publishing company, and publisher of the respected Nikkei 225 stock index.

Some former denizens of the various incarnations of FT Labs are listed in the alumni page.