Thank you to everyone who followed our webinar, but above all thank you for your valuable time. Were you unable to attend or would you like to watch the webinar again? No problem, you can find the recording of the webinar below.
Underneath the video, you can also find the presentation we used during the webinar, a summary of the webinar with the most important elements that were mentioned, as well as the link(s) to our little gift that we also had in store for you.
The global pandemic has taught us that today it has never been more important to screen, monitor, track and credit check your (inter)national business relations (markets) and their financial decisiveness. Therefore, financial company credit data is a must when making predictive, business credit decisions.
Problems in potential supply chains, challenges in the reliability of your business relationships and the financial resilience of companies in other countries are important international concerns for everyone's credit and risk management.
In short, a full screening of your (inter)national business relations is crucial for making (predictive) business credit decisions. With this webinar, we emphasise 'screen global' - always. Even if you are working on a national level, an international screening of your national business relationships is an absolute necessity in order to effectively understand with whom you are doing business in its full extent.
Only in this way can you make well-founded business credit decisions.
Why a credit check is an important aspect of your customer acceptance process?
A credit check is an important element in the customer onboarding process and gives you the necessary (financial) insight you need, to make an informed credit decision on whether or not to proceed with the customer's transaction.
Credit checking, with the help of a credit report, helps you to focus on customers who can effectively pay, while others may need a payment plan or may even need to be declined. Thus, it helps you in accepting a customer (or not). A credit check is essential for your risk assessment, as it supports your company in the prevention from taking on too much risk when granting credit, thus drastically reducing your risk of bad debts.
However, conducting a credit check is like taking a snapshot of a given moment. Therefore, it is essential that after you have conducted a credit check, you monitor these customers by setting certain triggers so that you are actually automatically alerted to changing circumstances, based on these set triggers, for better or for worse.
Even if you work nationally, international screenings are necessary.
Why? Simple, your customers and suppliers may have an international group structure or link.
If a parent company is located in e.g. Germany, you are de facto doing business with a German organisation. Or maybe tthe owner or founder of your most loyal customer may, for example, be Italian.
Another good example: the parent company of your client is a French organisation. Let's assume for a moment that the parent company is in bad shape, this will have disastrous consequences for the subsidiaries. If you have not checked this, you have overlooked vital information and have therefore not been able to carry out a proper credit check (or credit risk assessment) on the company that you are doing business with.
By the way, have you ever examined your suppliers? A vital aspect for the continuity of your organisation! Not to forget, there is a huge amount of imports (& exports) by our Belgian companies. Belgium is the 13 biggest exporter in the world and the 14 biggest importer globally. More than 70% of imports and exports take place within Europe, amounting to over 340,000.0 million euros.
Therefore, if you only conduct a national screening, there is a very real chance that you will not have completed a full credit risk assessment because you may have missed important information or financial company data that you haven't included in your assessment.
What elements should you check in an international transaction?
You can, of course, always try to find the information you need yourself by searching online, making enquiries with local authorities, asking questions towards the concerning company, and so on.
If you have to do this for every new and existing international partner, you not only lose a lot of time, but also a lot of resources and even the possibility of losing potential revenue. That should not be the intention.
We would like to give them the opportunity to use our national and international credit reports, as well as the monitoring platform, for 30 days. They can create an automatic account by using the following link:
Since you should have international data at your disposal, please check with your account manager for the possibilities. Nonetheless, we would like to give you a free Data Health Check (Screening) on an (inter)national portfolio by your choise.
