Louise Green is the Chief Marketing Officer at Bureau van Dijk, a Moody's Analytics company. It is committed to empowering customers to make better, faster decisions, by providing the most reliable private company information in the market. Below, Louise tells us about Bureau van Dijk’s Corporate and Financial Solutions and the importance of comparability and efficiency when it comes to data and company information.

 

Tell us about the key corporate and financial solutions that Bureau van Dijk offers

We aim to make our customers more successful by providing company information solutions that help improve efficiency, grow revenue and mitigate risk.

How much do you know about who you are doing business with?

Whether it’s the financial strength and longevity of your suppliers, your clients’ ability to pay, complying with regulations, protecting your reputation or understanding new and existing markets, more certainty is always welcome.

We capture a wide variety of data, then we treat, append and standardise it to make it richer, more powerful and easier to interrogate. In fact, we capture and treat data from more than 160 separate providers, and hundreds of our own sources, to create Orbis, the world’s most powerful comparable data resource on private companies.

Orbis has information on around 300 million companies in all countries. It’s the resource for company data.

The company reports are detailed and comparable, and comprise:

  • 26 balance sheet items
  • 26 profit and loss account items
  • 32 standard ratios

Our customers, including financial institutions, corporates, governments and academia, use our products for a variety of purposes.

 

Compliance and reputation management

With comprehensive global coverage, the richest source of corporate structures and beneficial ownership data available, plus information on PEPs and Sanctions, we are the resource for compliance and onboarding.

Financial risk

Our standardised financials help to assess and benchmark companies globally. We offer financial strength metrics using a range of models and include a qualitative score when detailed financials are not available.

Tax and transfer pricing strategies

We combine our comprehensive company information with transfer pricing functionality, so customers can plan, set policies, manage risk and document compliance processes.

Customers can also fine-tune policies, create robust audit-defence analysis and prepare TP documentation. We’ve created a full document management system to help with BEPS and country-by-country reporting requirements that helps customers become more efficient.

Business growth and strategy

Research new markets and industries, understand the M&A landscape and foreign and direct investment.

Orbis includes information on:

  • public and private company data – including banks and insurance companies
  • associated news and independent research
  • global M&A deals and rumours
  • ESG reputational risk ratings and metrics
  • original filed documents and document-ordering services

 

Data is getting bigger all the time, which makes extracting value from the numbers more difficult and time consuming. One of the ways that we increase efficiency is by making it simple to compare companies internationally.

Using our solutions, customers can interpret data quickly, and automate and centralise much of their research.

 

In what ways have Bureau van Dijk’s offering evolved over the years?

Bureau van Dijk has been an innovator in private company information since its beginning. We first delivered company information to clients on CD - then DVD-ROMs. This was a ground breaking way for companies to quickly research other companies. While we still offer on-premise solutions, our data and analysis resources today are accessible in the cloud, in third-party platforms and through integration into systems and workflows.

Our products are just as innovative today. For example, it’s not just that we offer the world’s most powerful comparable data resource on private companies, or the extensive corporate ownership structures included within it, it’s often how you can combine datasets in new and innovative ways to create better solutions for customers. For example:

  • By combining our ownership data with our sanctioned-by-extension data, compliance with the EU and OFAC legislation becomes much easier.
  • Orbis Intellectual Property links global patent data to companies and corporate groups in a way that’s never been done before
  • Orbis CrossBorder Investment is the only solution that combines information on greenfield projects with M&A to understand globalisation, and delivers information on the companies behind the investments

Customers can blend our data with internal data to refresh and enrich CRMs and other internal databases. Our unique company identifiers and bespoke matching services help to create links between disparate datasets across organisations and create single views from data silos.

We recently updated the interface for Orbis and several other products to make them even easier to search for and visualise data with pivot analyses, heat maps, dynamic company structures and more. These and other changes were made based on interactive feedback from our customers. We bring data to life in new ways with reports and dashboards that give a clear, intuitive view into the information that matters most.

 

How important is it for businesses to trust a data specialist like Bureau van Dijk when it comes to data and company information?

At Bureau van Dijk, we’re in the business of certainty. It’s vital that companies know who they are dealing with. Before embarking on a major investment, a new third-party relationship or procurement decision, companies need to have confidence that the information they base their decisions on is accurate and comprehensive.

As businesses can be global and often complex, it's harder to get a clear view of all entities involved and who holds control. We make it easy to analyse management and ownership structures. Orbis includes extensive corporate structures so you can assess the complete group or take the financial stability of the parent into account.

Having a clear view of ownership also helps our users comply with sanctions lists, anti-money laundering legislation and to perform the other crucial due diligence checks that are intrinsic to global business.

 

What are Bureau van Dijk’s goals for the future?

Our mission has always been to provide the most reliable private company data on the market. We will continue to enrich and expand our private company information database. This means identifying and integrating new, reliable information sources and standardising data to make it more comparable and useful for our customers’ decision-making processes.

 

 Contact details:

To find out about our free trial scheme, please visit www.bvdinfo.com or email bvd@bvdinfo.com.

Telephone (London): +44 207549 5000