CM April 2020

OPINION
AUTHOR – Cato Syversen FCICM
throughout their supply chain. And where does
this responsibility land up? More often than not
it is with the people who access the data.
No longer are credit professionals solely
judging financial and commercial risk;
legislative and reputational issues are also
piling up in their in-trays. However, they should
not be seeing this as a problem. Dealing with it
professionally and successfully is yet another
way of proving the value of the function and the
business intelligence that is accessible by credit
professionals. It is the role of their suppliers to
help make that as easy as possible by not just
providing information but solutions, providing
information in a usable form. We should be
across the legislation as it develops, anticipate
its impact and magnitude and automatically
Alongside our
increasing focus
on integration we
are also ensuring
that our risk
analytics and
scoring solutions
are of the highest
possible accuracy.
integrate the outcomes needed by users within
our product suites.
We are increasingly entering an era of data
co-operation. Information from a business
information provider on its own will never be as
powerful or as usable as when it is successfully
integrated with our customers’ data and
embedded within their systems. As a business
and an industry we are increasingly focused
on developing and delivering stable and robust
integrations based on simple APIs that not only
make our data deliver the information required
but ensure full compliance with the full range of
changing legislative needs. Our industry needs
to be providing solutions that are constantly
updated, but that can also learn and adapt to
ensure that the credit and risk management
professionals we are serving are always in a
position to make the very best decisions.
Alongside our increasing focus on integration
we are also ensuring that our risk analytics and
scoring solutions are of the highest possible
accuracy. We have already launched four new
scorecards across several markets in the last two
years and will continue to speed up that rate of
change through 2020 and beyond. Developments
in machine learning and artificial intelligence
mean that we will soon be able to increase
the pace of change while seamlessly updating
customers’ solutions.
TWO-WAY STREET
This need not just be a two-way street however,
the flexibility of an approach like this enables
our customers to put themselves at the heart
of their very own joined up network, not just
sharing their data with us and integrating it with
our full suite of global business intelligence,
but reaching out to their own customers and
encouraging the next level of integration
with their customers benefitting from the
advantages of further data exchange. As this
putative multi-level network grows then the
exchange, verification and updating of the
wider information base allows the quality of
analysis to improve, better decisions to be made
and legislative compliance to be assured.
As an industry we’ve come a long way from
delivering printed manual reports to a select
few credit managers in a tiny proportion of
the world’s businesses. We’ve gone through the
ready supply of online reports and the widening
availability of information at an affordable price
for the many to an increasingly commonplace
integrated approach which joins up a customers’
internal data with our external information.
However, I am now genuinely excited to see
the next step taking place where we develop
new intelligent networks, constantly updating
and developing themselves and delivering fresh
reliable usable solutions for us all.
Cato Syversen FCICM is CEO Creditsafe Group.
Advancing the credit profession / www.cicm.com / April 2020 / PAGE 37