Last Updated on: 20th May 2024, 06:39 pm
Leading credit insurer Coface has introduced its new platform, the culmination of four years of development, which promises to transition from “Big Data” to “Smart Data” in the realm of business information.
Named URBA 360 (Universal Risk Business Assessment), this platform provides access to data on 195 million companies across 200 countries, by aggregating information from various sources, including legal information sources and more “on-the-ground” sources, such as payment histories and alerts from its own insured clients, as well as reports from its field experts.
Nesrin Gonin, Director of Information Services for France and Western Europe at Coface, stated: “We focus on credit risk and the probability of default, our core business. Some of our clients use our services to seek information on their suppliers, their sales targets, or even their competitors.”
When querying a company, users can access a pie-chart menu consisting of six segments: credit risk score (1 to 10, from worst to best), credit opinion, financial situation, Payment Index (company’s payment behaviour), country risk (company’s environment), and sector (sector risk, comparison of the target’s performance with its competitors). Green indicates good status, orange signifies the need for monitoring, and red signals a very high risk of default. The system provides reports that are regularly updated by the group’s 700 local experts.
Nesrin Gonin added: “Besides the ergonomic and high-performance aspect of the tool, enhanced by artificial intelligence, what is distinctive about this offer is that Coface is also a credit insurer.
“In other words, like our peers, Coface’s company databases are enriched with information coming from our own insured clients, for better or worse, and even from businesses that voluntarily share their financial data to be ‘scored’ because a good score is demanded by their contractors.”
Nesrin Gonin also emphasised the system’s ability to detect “weak signals” of a company’s solvency deterioration at an early stage. This was demonstrated in the case of a French energy player caught off guard by the sudden bankruptcy of the British construction group Buckingham Group in August 2023, which left £108 million of unpaid debts.
The French company, which suffered a significant loss on this client, wanted to verify if the platform would have alerted it. Indeed, according to the history of this British company, its score, still good in 2022 at 7/10, plummeted at the beginning of 2023 to 4 and then to 1 in August. This was a signal from the payment incidents reported by Coface’s policyholders months earlier.
Andrew Share, UK director of Business Information, said: “Thanks to our ecosystem of credit-insured clients, we benefit from their day-to-day trading patterns. Our analysts are able to react and adjust our scores from the intel only Coface is privileged to.”
This B2B service is available only in the form of annual packages (no unit sales), with prices varying according to the number of countries and companies per country monitored, ranging from a few thousand to several hundred thousand euros.
Coface plans to expand both in France and internationally, highlighting that it can be used equally by large groups, mid-sized enterprises, and SMEs. It currently has 15,000 business information clients.
For more information about Coface in the UK and Ireland, please visit www.coface.uk.
