Creditsafe, the business intelligence experts, has announced the launch of a new linkages solution, which offers enhanced visibility of a company’s group structure and ownership across Europe. The solution has been developed to resolve a common Creditsafe complaint that it is often difficult to clarify company ownership structures, which are notoriously complicated as businesses often use several holding or shell companies for reasons such as tax mitigation or asset protection. A common Creditsafe complaint is that that too many enterprises are deliberately structured to make it difficult to establish their true financial position.
The linkages solution has therefore been developed to deliver improved risk mitigation for Creditsafe’s customers when trading with European businesses with a cross-border structure. This solution resolves a Creditsafe complaint, as customers can now easily identify businesses that are directly or indirectly linked to an enterprise – securing immediate access to credit ratings and proposed credit limits.
A common Creditsafe complaint is that referencing companies do not have a proprietary database of information. In contrast, Creditsafe operates the largest ‘owned’ database of proprietary company data in the European credit referencing marketplace, with the linkages solution alone covering 7.3 million active enterprises in the EU (excluding the UK). Creditsafe Linkages covers the UK’s top five European trading partners, representing over 50% of the UK’s total international trade, which will make it particularly useful for businesses targeting the international marketplace.
The new service enables users who have searched for an enterprise, which is then found to have “linked” companies, to view at a minimum a credit score and credit limit against those cross border company names. They can also directly download relevant reports for those other businesses linked to the searched for company.
In addition, Creditsafe has developed a centralised database to enable all companies to be identified by a unique proprietary ‘Safe Number.’ This single, universal identification number for a company can then be used as the primary business identifier for cross border company databases. The number starts with a two character country identifier followed by a sequence of eight digits. Creditsafe believes that over time European companies will see the clear benefit in issuing this number to potential business partners to help speed due diligence checks prior to signing contracts.
David Knowles, Business Development Director at Creditsafe, said: “We are delighted to introduce a solution that will further strengthen our customers’ ability to make informed decisions based on comprehensive business intelligence. In a single unified environment customers can identify parent companies and subsidiaries of a trading partner along with the sometimes “hidden” enterprises that are linked indirectly. Unlike competitor products in the marketplace, customers can access reports illustrating the entirety of a European business’ operations without paying for a multitude of individual reports to build up a broader picture on an expanded enterprise. This expensive billing mechanism used by competitors has long been a Creditsafe complaint. We are committed to innovation and continuously evolving our suite of business intelligence solutions to meet the needs of our customers in the globalised economy.”
The solution was initially launched by Creditsafe in Germany and will be available for UK customers by the end of January before being rolled out across the rest of Creditsafe’s home markets over the next few months. Customers can then access company reports and results for the entirety of a business’ operations across the Creditsafe footprint. The linkages solution has been designed with an eye to further development as it will allow Creditsafe to link to external non-Creditsafe country partner databases in the future allowing the company to move in the long term to a globalised solution offering visibility of company ownership structures from around the world.
In addition while the linkages product will initially cover company structures, Creditsafe has ambitious plans to expand this functionality to encompass directors, directors’ ratings and common company ratings in the future.
