Bureau van Dijk: Welcome to the Business of Certainty

It takes years of good decisions to build a company's solid reputation, but probably just one to ruin it. What if you were able to bring to light your business decisions and outcomes from the shadow of uncertainty? Imagine how it would impact your business growth!

Helping companies experience new levels of certainty, in today's volatile, interconnected, and complex business landscape, is the firm Bureau van Dijk. With their Asia- Pacific headquarters in Singapore, the company is a leading provider of private company, corporate ownership, and deal information. One of the company's strongest offerings is their corporate ownership information which includes beneficial ownership, ultimate domestic owners, and controlling owners. Giving insights into the company's processes, Michael Klentz, Managing Director - APAC region, highlights, “With information on over 200 million companies, we are the resource for company data. We do this through collaboration with a network of information providers around the world, through our own research, and because we maintain a mergers and acquisitions database.” The company's ownership set shows direct and indirect ownership paths, with ownership percentages between entities and other entities or individuals, and allowing ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ analyses. This information is supported by dynamic visualization tools such as Orbis Ownership Explorer. “Experience new levels of certainty by using Orbis and make the best-informed decisions quickly and confidently,” states Klentz.

While ownership is pivotal to Bureau van Dijk's offerings, the company's clients have found immense value in their Compliance Catalyst, first-class entity identification capabilities, and information on PEPs (Politically Exposed Person) and sanctions. “We have spent a lot of time building up ownership information and linking ownership throughout the world. This has given us a unique opportunity to be a strong player in the compliance field as well,” asserts Klentz.

According to a widely cited study by the World Economic Forum, more than 25 percent of a company’s market value is directly attributable to its reputation. Thus, dealing with the right companies and in the right manner is crucial. Klentz adds, “Bureau van Dijk's database of private companies is unrivaled. One can be certain that when you've identified a company, it's the right company to focus on.”

Bureau van Dijk's compliance solutions deal with anti-corruption, third-party due diligence, anti-money laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC), and trade compliance. Klentz states, “Bureau van Dijk's solutions are most concerned with helping companies vet and perform due diligence on the third-party companies that they deal with, as well as helping identify any owners that fall within the definition of beneficial owners – generally for AML work or controlling owners, particularly in sanctions screening.” The risk factors differ from industry to industry and institutions/businesses in the same industry have different risk appetites. Bureau van Dijk's Compliance Catalyst platform customizes the compliance process, giving users the ability to set up their own compliance model and operate with greater efficiency. The platform streamlines users' compliance and due diligence work. By tapping into Orbis, it holds data centrally, helps users blend their own data into their research, creates workflows, integrates with users' existing workflows, and delivers robust reporting with full audit trail and annotations. Moreover, the platform is easy to implement and easy to use. It caters to two different sets of users – sophisticated and unsophisticated. For the unsophisticated user, the platform has a color-coded system.

The sheer number of accolades under Bureau van Dijk's belt highlights the supremacy of their offerings, and the increasing number of offices around the world demonstrates their global appeal. Giving insights into the company’s plans for geographical coverage expansion, Klentz highlights, “Now the expansions that we make are in the number of companies for which we have information, as well as in the depth of information.” The recent advancements include the addition of over five million U.S. companies, a quarter of a million extra Australian companies, and significant coverage growth in countries such as China, Japan, Russia, USA, Tajikistan, Nepal, and Brazil. The newly released version of Orbis has many additional enhancements like better visual effects, increased analytics potential, and clearer search abilities. “The goal has always been to capture and exhibit the best possible data, the most complete set of data and the best-interlinked data,” asserts Klentz.