Tag: Directorships

Artesian Data Extensions

Sales and Risk Intelligence vendor Artesian Solutions announced three data extensions to its company and contact universe: two U.K. dataset extensions and an Irish dataset.  On January 14th, they unveiled their new Connect platform and a broader product vision.

“We’re delighted to kick off 2021 on such a high. These new premium data points are fundamental to the KYC and compliance processes for many of our customers, so it was a logical extension to the data they currently rely on to engage with their customers.“

Artesian CEO Andrew Yates

The first data extension is U.K. County Court Judgments (CCJs) and legal notices such as receiverships and winding-up petitions.  CCJs are useful for financial services onboarding, due diligence, and risk assessment.

The Adverse Director History dataset assists with KYC/AML processes and highlights whether a Director was previously associated with a firm that ended up in insolvency, administration, or bankruptcy.

Artesian already provides access to other compliance datasets such as Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), terrorist lists, and sanctions lists.  Additional details will be released in next week’s platform announcement.

The new Artesian:Connect platform supports custom processing rules and alerting for CCJs and adverse director histories.  Data goes back as far as twenty years.

The Irish dataset provides four years of company financials, director checks, and company news.  Firmographic data includes addresses, trading status, registration numbers, and auditor information.  Company data is available through Artesian Engage, the Artesian Ready app for iOS and Android, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics.  Coverage spans 250,000 companies.  

Artesian did not publicly disclose the Irish data vendor, but it is a highly credible data source.

Artesian Solutions already provides coverage of Britain, the U.S., and Canada.  Customers can license the countries in any combination, including Ireland only, U.K. + Ireland, and all four countries together.

Artesian had a successful 2020 as customers looked for remote vendor solutions for both sales and compliance/onboarding.  Usage was up sharply for both product lines.  According to Chief Customer Officer Mike Blackadder, Artesian’s “training teams have never been so busy.”

Artesian hosted a virtual summit for its Connect platform on January 14th. Coverage continues tomorrow.

Echobot British Data

German Sales Intelligence vendor Echobot announced that it is expanding beyond the D-A-CH (Germany / Austria / Switzerland) region and building a European solution.  The first step in this expansion is an English-language UI with five million British companies and 23 million decision-makers.

“The market expansion into the English-speaking area is an important step into the future for us.  It has never been more important for companies to set up their sales and marketing processes digitally.  We are very pleased about the strong growth and the fact that from now on, we can support our customers beyond national borders,” said Echobot Media Technologies CEO Bastian Karweg.

Echobot users can add the “UK Data Pack” to their D-A-CH coverage with the data available for their TARGET (prospecting) and CONNECT (sales intelligence) services.  They may also license the UK offering as a standalone service.

Company profiles include firmographics, contact information, registration numbers, web technologies, social media links, current and former directors, executives, company news, Registration and LEI Numbers, and UK SIC or German WZ (NACE variant) industry codes.

An interlinks graph ties together company and director relationships.  

Company news and signals are collected from online publications, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.  Signals (event triggers) may be filtered by signal type or keyword, and news may be filtered by keyword, source, and whether the article is by or about the company.

There is still some tuning around company news tagging, but the product is just being launched.  Echobot has a long history of German-language signal monitoring and tagging, so it will likely address this problem fairly swiftly.

Contact data is GDPR compliant, with 68% of contacts having emails and 5% displaying direct dials.  “We strictly comply with GDPR, only using dials that have been made public on the web,” said Karweg.  “We do not use privacy-infringing tactics like signature block scanning.”  Contact data sourcing is provided so that if a rep is asked about the origination of a prospect’s personal data, the sales rep can provide the source.  As part of their compliance, the firm has a data privacy officer (a GDPR requirement) and a privacy page that allows individuals to remove themselves from the database.

Echobot provides LinkedIn and XING (a popular LinkedIn rival in the D-A-CH region) contact hyperlinks, but chose not to provide Twitter or Facebook contact links “since those networks usually are used for private networking.” Directors are cross-referenced with LinkedIn and company websites to enrich their profiles further.

Contact news is gathered, though it is usually only available for top execs.

Up to twenty contacts may be viewed or downloaded from the company profile.  Contact data includes email, direct dial phone, title, and source (e.g. LinkedIn, XING, Companies House, company website).  Information sources are displayed as icons with hyperlinks.

Users may filter the contacts by department and level.  They may also search the list by name or title.

Echobot collects most of its information from Companies House and online crawling.  They have a third-party vendor relationship for email verification and social media cross-referencing but do not disclose the partner’s name.­­­

Company data are updated daily and consolidated as soon as there have been relevant changes.  Contact data are updated every 30 days or so; however, “due to GDPR, we update all contacts at least once every six months,” said Karweg.  “If they aren’t publicly available anymore, they will be deleted from our database.”

Financial data is only available for the D-A-CH region, but it is on the 2021 UK roadmap.

The CONNECT sales intelligence service has a responsive design for mobile and tablet display.  The TARGET prospecting tool is currently optimized for desktop use, but a mobile-ready version is on the 2021 roadmap.

CONNECT supports browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Explorer.  The extensions take the user from a company URL to the CONNECT company profile.

Echobot CONNECT for Salesforce supports I-Frame viewing within Company, Contact, and Lead records.  When new records are created, they are matched against the Echobot reference database for enrichment.  Stare-and-compare record updates are also supported.

Part II tomorrow covers the TARGET service and product pricing.

Artesian Risk and Compliance Hub

Artesian will be launching its Risk and Compliance Hub, which supports front-line KYC checks, in 2019.
Artesian will be launching its Risk and Compliance Hub, which supports front-line KYC checks, in 2019.

Artesian Solutions CEO Andrew Yates published a year-in-review blog and a preview of their upcoming Artesian Risk and Compliance Hub (ARCH).  The new ARCH capabilities will extend their social selling platform into Know Your Client (KYC) reviews at UK banks. ARCH is in early testing.

ARCH leverages Artesian capabilities around interpreting structured and unstructured data ”to create useful flags and to drive appropriate actions.”  Artesian already is on the desktop of relationship managers (RMs) at most of the major UK banks.  “This puts us in a unique position to make insights regarding financial and KYC risks available to the front-line as a pre-screen, to ensure that corporate banking relationships begin with an appropriate understanding of risk.”

Arch supports an automated audit trail and storage of evidence.  Early tests found ARCH to be “100% accurate in reflecting policy in pre-screening.”  Arch also reduced the time spent in gathering risk assessment data by 90% and identified 14% more risk issues compared with manual processing.

By providing a pre-screen at the front-end of client discussions, RMs can focus on new clients that will pass muster during the onboarding review process.  This process makes both relationship managers and compliance professionals more effective.  RMs will no longer be spending time with prospective clients that won’t pass compliance review while compliance professionals can focus their attention on more complex reviews which require their skill and expertise.

“ARCH gives companies control of a sophisticated decision engine to enable data being accessed to have rules applied and flags created. It means that Relationship Managers can see a summarised view of what their central risk teams assessment of a potential client would be, before spending time and money engaging with them. The automation aspect of this is fundamental as it brings efficiency, consistency and control to the areas it transforms.

But more than that, it places compliance at the heart of the business – front of mind for every member of staff, informing every decision, instructing every interaction and shaping every relationship from pre-screens for new customer prospecting through to long-standing client development.”

Artesian CEO Andrew Yates

Yates cited McKinsey research which notes that the risk function at financial institutions is being transformed “with the detection, assessment, and mitigation of risk” being transferred to all employees by 2025.

Risk and Compliance tools are a greater focus amongst European sales intelligence firms due to the availability of private company registry data.  While US private companies provide only minimalist filings with Secretaries of State offices (with a few exceptions in insurance, banking, and nonprofits), UK company registration data includes directors, shareholders, and financials.  Other UK compliance data includes sanctions lists, Politically Exposed Persons (global government officials and relatives), disqualified directors, gazettes (shuttered business and those in receivership), and traditional credit reports.  Vendors such as Artesian, DueDil, and Bureau van Dijk have recently emphasized compliance and risk tool development over sales intelligence offerings.

Artesian reached 30,000 users in 2018 with their user base tracking over 800,000 companies.  According to Yates, Artesian customers “have received 12.5 million actionable insights, 2.5m unique computational matches each week, automated the equivalent of 2 trillion Google searches per week (13bn per hour), and have made 523,813 useful connections using Artesian data.”

Artesian staff provided over 350 training sessions, webinars, and workshops to more than 3,000 users in 2018.  Artesian Academy delivered an additional 1,200 multi-media tutorials, certification modules, role-based tips, and social media best practices overviews.