Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics company, has won awards for Best Data Entity Solution in A-Team Group’s Data Management Insight Awards Europe and USA. The awards celebrate leading providers of data management solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets participants.
Bureau van Dijk’s entity data management solution, Orbis, was selected as a winner by A-Team Group’s European and US data management communities.
David East, Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics, explains why and how the company’s award-winning solution was created, its use cases, and the benefits it can deliver. He also discusses the development roadmap.
A-Team: David, please tell us about Bureau van Dijk and the types of capital markets clients the company works with.
David: Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics company, provides entity data management solutions based on information covering over 448 million companies worldwide. Our data solutions and capabilities have grown, and continue to grow, both organically and through acquisition to ensure our solutions are best in class.
We work with a cross-section of capital markets participants and support clients with multiple use cases including onboarding, counterparty and third-party risk, sanctions screening and sanctions by extension.
A-Team: How do you address challenges currently faced by financial institutions?
David: Financial institutions are operating in an uncertain economic environment characterised by geopolitical and climate challenges, and supply chain shortages. Against this background, we combine robust data and risk management, which are often operated separately at financial institutions, and put ownership data at the core. We harmonise and standardise entity data to provide clients with an integrated view of risk – an essential in the current climate.
A-Team: What solutions are helpful here and what is the role of the company’s award-winning offering?
David: Orbis, our award-winning entity data solution, is a growing database of companies and other entities, and a powerful comparable data resource on private companies. It leads the way here, providing robust reference data and capabilities such as entity data quality checks and source monitoring.
When new industry challenges arise, Orbis helps clients meet them with the most accessible and accurate entity data available.
A-Team: What does Orbis offer to users and how does it work?
David: Orbis is all about accurate entity data, ease of access, and usability. These elements are our differentiators and mean we can make data available to clients as and when they want it.
As I mentioned above, Orbis provides information on 448 million companies and entities around the world. Its underlying technology is query-based and supports a number of access methods. For example, a user interface provides direct access to entity datasets, and our award-winning Moody’s DataHub can split datasets, combine our data with the user’s data, and allow users to pull only the relevant data they need.
We also offer APIs and in the past few years have developed connectors that allow clients to pull relevant datasets directly into applications such as Salesforce and SAP Ariba.
We have released a cloud native version of Orbis and are helping clients migrate to the solution in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. In terms of emerging technologies, we are always looking for efficiencies. At the moment, we are exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as a means of gaining greater insight into entity ownership and proprietary data sets.
A-Team: What are the benefits of implementing Orbis?
David: The benefits of using Orbis include the extent and detail of entity data that is easily accessible, and our commitment to enrich data in the database and add new data and data types – we are not standing still.
For example, the 448 million entities covered represent growth of 46% over the past four years, including 45 million private companies with detailed financial information. Orbis also hosts 384 million people, offering a total of 1.6 billion ownership linkages, more than any other entity data solutions provider.
Anticipating and keeping pace with market needs, more than 316 million companies in the database have ESG predicted scores.
A-Team: David, please talk us through a case study using Orbis.
David: We were engaged by a payroll services and HR solutions company that wanted to start on a master data journey. We matched and cleaned up the company’s customer and prospect records, and integrated Orbis into its data lake for advanced hierarchy modelling.
The company also integrated Orbis into its customer relationship management (CRM) software to provide salespeople with firmographic data that could be used to create a complete view of existing customers and improved data on prospects.
As a result, the company could run advanced analyses using data from Orbis, create a better view of its customers, and improve targeting. Sales of HR software increased.
A-Team: How will you develop Orbis over the next year?
David: Our goal is to make Orbis the most useful dataset in the market. We will continue to extend the breadth and depth of its datasets and acquire more data to extend coverage of companies and entities. For example, we will add assets to entity data to help clients gain a better understanding of the risks presented by companies and their ownership structures.
We also will continue adding risk scores. We added ESG predictive scores in 2022, and next plan to add cyber risk scores to help market participants identify increasing cyber threats. There is also a focus on challenges in the supply chain.
Orbis is not a single solution, but a growing, multi-faceted proposition that can help clients access the datasets they need to achieve required solutions and meet industry challenges.
A-Team: Finally, what does winning the award for best entity data solution in both Europe and the USA mean to Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics company?
David: To win awards in both Europe and the USA is great. The awards are a response to what Orbis offers and validate the work we do. I would like to thank everyone on our team who works on and is involved with our award-winning solution and the A-Team Group data management communities for their vote of confidence in our entity data solution.
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