• Why Credit Risk Manager
• Sample Credit Report
• How it's made

Business credit reports aren’t just pulled out of a drawer. They are the end product of a long process of data extraction, refinement and assembly.

Extraction: raw credit data from many sources
Raw credit data is gathered from many areas, not only from the obvious sources that you would expect, such as chambers of commerce and other publicly available sources. It is also gathered from banks, financial administrations of our clients, large suppliers, company houses, company interviews and other parties such as marketing agencies. This is a huge research effort, which requires hundreds of thousands of surveys by local parties in each region of the world.

Refinement: checking and cross-referencing the data
Next, the data must be cleared of impurities. Consistency is important. As a rule of thumb, about six per cent of the basic company data is normally rejected and needs to be cleared up. For example: if addresses don’t exist or a legal form is not consistent between files, or if annual figures and/or balances are not correct in some ways. All this needs to be cleared up before the process can continue to the next stage: assembly.
 
Assembly: creating a useful credit report
All the refined data is assembled to show meaningful relations. The combination of persons and companies is especially important. Was this board member involved in a chain of bankruptcies? What is the background of the shareholders?

Next, data is weighed for optimal prediction of the company’s creditworthiness. This assembly line is continuously fine-tuned for optimal output. For example: what weight should be given to the sector that the company operates in? And what weight should be given to payment history and legal form?

Presentation: a user-friendly layout
The result of all this combining and weighing is a balanced business credit report with a comprehensible credit rating and recommendations. It presents easy-to-read information about operations, a balance sheet, payment trends and much more.