Dun & Bradstreet unveiled a new Beneficial Ownership product to assist with client onboarding and back-book remediation of current customers.  The service helps determine who are the ultimate benefactors of each transaction.  Beneficial Ownership assists with legal compliance including Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering, Politically Exposed Persons (PEP), and sanctions lists monitoring.  Overall, there are around a dozen relevant regulations concerning beneficial ownership with different thresholds for research.  By automating these checks, which have historically required manual research teams, Dun & Bradstreet is reducing time, expense, and risk (e.g. credit, supplier, reputational) while expediting the client onboarding process.

“Compliance teams are challenged to manage third-party due diligence, Anti-Money Laundering, Know Your Customer and tax compliance regulations through manual processes that can be costly and inefficient,” said Brian Alster, Dun & Bradstreet’s Global Head of Supply and Compliance. “By harnessing Dun & Bradstreet’s verified data with D&B Beneficial Ownership, the process can be easily automated to fast-track standard onboarding, helping companies relieve compliance burdens, and get back to driving growth.”

While family trees focus on controlling interest there are numerous legal reasons to look beyond controlling interest.  These include onboarding and ongoing compliance (e.g. KYC, AML, PEP, sanctions) as well as company research relevant to conflicts of interest, supply chain risk, and vetting customers, partners, service providers, and resellers.

The new offering, which draws from the D&B WorldBase file of 265 million active and inactive company records, spans 62 countries and 71 million shareholders.  D&B Beneficial Ownership is available through batch, real-time, and online access via the D&B Direct API or D&B Onboard.   The service also delivers ownership change alerts and a visualization layer which displays a spider-web view of branches and loops of business structures.  To assist with varying global requirements, users can query at different ownership thresholds.  Both corporate and individual beneficial owners are assessed across 100 million plus connections.

With D&B Direct 2.0, API clients pass the company name which is DUNS Matched.  The API then returns a detailed list of shareholders to the desired threshold including percent of ownership and loops (i.e. cross-ownerships).

Dun & Bradstreet collects shareholdings data from registered filings (mostly in Europe), direct research teams, and licensed data.  Ownership data goes down to 0.1% ownership levels.  Other compliance data includes PEP flags,  sanctions lists (e.g. OFAC), and adverse media searches.

Beneficial Ownership intelligence is also important for companies with deep supply chains looking to prevent reputational risk and ensure a minimal level of ethical behavior amongst their subcontractors.  Last May, Dun & Bradstreet launched a Human Trafficking Risk Index tool which helps firms avoid dodgy suppliers that may be using slave labor.   The Human Trafficking Risk Index is the first in a series of “Responsible Business Analytics” products in their pipeline.