Trade credit is a valuable tool for growing your business and establishing long-term customer relationships. It fosters collaboration between businesses to make efficient use of short-term capital to accomplish various shared objectives. But, it doesn’t come without risks, which can be addressed by establishing and maintaining an effective trade credit risk management program, supported by trusted third-party data.
You need to be able to quickly assess risks during the customer onboarding process and effectively monitor changes to your existing customer risk profiles. To perform these functions, you will need your customer to provide robust company and financial information, and a way to verify and expand upon this information. However, collecting all that information from independent sources can be difficult and time consuming and most trade credit management functions are not staffed to do that effectively.
As a result, trade credit decisions are often delayed, putting the customer relationship and revenue at risk.
Most firms have insufficient information available to perform effective trade credit risk management, and so you need to supplement with information from a trusted and unbiased third-party. That information might include entity, corporate structure, M&A, corporate events, spending, and/or accounts payable behavior data relating to your customers.
In addition to this critical data, the best providers also deliver tools that make Trade Credit Managers more productive, like credit scores, ESG scores, and alerts about any changes within a customer portfolio. Together, these data and tools help you build a 360° view of your customers, so you can make more informed decisions about extending new lines of credit, changing existing credit terms, and identifying potential payment risks.
- Information on over 472 million entities worldwide, and 40 million locations in North America
- Probability of default scores and other financial metrics to help your team assess and monitor your customer portfolio
- Peer comparisons of your customer’s behavior toward your firm vs. other similar suppliers and industry benchmarks to inform your continuous improvement initiatives
