Case studies >>
Sigma Ratings
Sigma automates risk detection & monitoring with OpenCorporates’ data
Sigma Ratings (Sigma) is an AI-driven risk management platform which helps financial institutions and other firms to detect, score and monitor risks across the client lifecycle.
By integrating OpenCorporates’ data into their platform, Sigma helps their customers identify risk more effectively, monitor third party populations more efficiently and free up time to focus on analysis over manual effort.
Gabrielle Haddad, Founder and COO, SIGMA RATINGS
Identifying risk amongst a company’s customers, suppliers and other third parties is critical. But compliance teams have traditionally relied on manual processes – sifting through a plethora of risk intelligence sources to screen third parties.
Legacy methods aren’t enough to keep up with today’s ever-changing regulatory, geopolitical and reputational challenges, not to mention the exponential increase in information that can be used to inform Know Your Customer (KYC) or other risk management processes.
In response, Sigma’s platform automates the detection of risk by screening and continually monitoring a company’s third parties against watchlists, negative news and many other sources – creating a single source of risk intelligence.
An early challenge Sigma faced is that companies and their officers are referred to inconsistently across data sources. This makes it difficult to know which legal entity is being referred to and to automate the risk identification process reliably time after time.
Sigma overcame this hurdle by integrating OpenCorporates’ transparent company data into their platform.
Transparent company data, which is up-to-date, unified and traceable to official sources, acts as a foundational reference dataset for the world’s legal entities and the officers associated with them.
It allows Sigma’s system to resolve inconsistent references to companies down to the unique legal entity they correspond to, and then append officer, address and risk-related information found in other sources on top in order to create risk scores.
Sigma’s users therefore are able to assert that the company they are searching for is the one mentioned across the risk-related data sources Sigma integrates with, allowing them to make more informed risk management decisions.
Sigma chose OpenCorporates for four main reasons:
- Global coverage enables triangulation of third parties worldwide — Third parties that Sigma’s users need to uniquely identify and screen could be incorporated anywhere across the globe. OpenCorporates is ideal to meet this need, as we provide company information from over 140 jurisdictions in one place – all traceable back to official sources, enabling defensible risk management.
- Real-time access to up-to-date data — Our data enables Sigma’s users to access company information as it appears in our database. Sigma’s users can be confident they are seeing the latest information about companies we have collected from official sources.
- Ease of integration — All of the data we collect is harmonized according to a single global schema, making it easy to integrate into Sigma’s platform and ideal to power an automated repeatable due diligence process.
- Flexibility of a customer-first approach — OpenCorporates’ team works with disruptive companies such as Sigma to help them deliver innovative solutions for market problems.
Image: Illustrative example of how the Sigma platform uses OpenCorporates data to identify companies and then append risk-related data on top
Integrating transparent company data into Sigma’s platform enhances the way their customers can carry out risk detection in a number of ways.
- Enhanced risk detection
Users can search across data sources to identify risks they may not otherwise have found. This helps uncover financial crime risks and protects a company against a range of integrity risks. Without the foundational legal entity information, it wouldn’t be possible to identify companies and append risk-related information to them at scale.
- Powers ongoing monitoring
Risk never stands still. Sigma’s platform helps its users to monitor third parties for any changes in their risk profile. This is supported by the latest company data available in OpenCorporates, ensuring companies can respond faster to risk.
Greater efficiency
As the Sigma platform automates the collection of risk-related information about their users’ third parties, their risk management teams can spend more time analysing and interpreting data – instead of being bogged down by manual processes.
Sigma Ratings provides a new, smarter way to continuously evaluate risk and build trust in any relationship. Using advanced real-time risk analysis and monitoring technology, Sigma actively screens thousands of global data sources to deliver essential compliance insights through a single platform, thereby reducing manual workflows, enriching existing client data and helping teams make clearer, more timely decisions for onboarding, relationship management and investigations.
Because Sigma has brought all relevant risk data sources into its own cloud-based data lake, it is able to draw connections between different data sets – enabling a shift from the point-in-time reviews employed today to dynamic analysis and interpretation of client data.
Fresh, standardised, fully auditable information, underpinned by our Legal-Entity Data Principles, this is data you can trust.
