At Creditsafe, we are committed to delivering our services to the highest standard. As the COVID-19 epidemic continues to evolve, we want to let you know that we have a comprehensive plan in place to ensure the highest level of security, uptime, resiliency, and availability. Being able to respond quickly to rapidly-evolving situations like this epidemic whilst maintaining uninterrupted service is part of Creditsafe’s Business Continuity Program and a big part of our commitment to our customers.
We understand the importance of co-operating with our customers, suppliers and partners during times of uncertainty to ensure the safe continuation of our business and activities. To help provide more visibility into our strategy, we wanted to communicate additional details about our plans and how we execute on them whilst maintaining the health and safety of our employees. These plans identify our most critical processes, mitigation strategies, and human response efforts during an incident or disaster. We've already enacted several measures across our business to ensure complete service delivery and the continued wellbeing of our staff.
As part of our business continuity framework, our Senior Management Team are carefully monitoring the development of the Coronavirus outbreak across all of our operating locations across the UK, Europe, Asia and America.
This includes:
- Daily monitoring of the advice and guidance issued by the Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health Authorities and the World Health Organisation;
- Daily monitoring of reported cases and infection rates;
- Monitoring of Foreign & Commonwealth travel advice for Creditsafe colleagues travelling on business;
- Internal monitoring of absence levels in line with typical measures at this time of year;
- Internal communications to provide updates to our colleagues.
In addition to taking advice from leading public authorities, we are ready to put in place appropriate and precautionary measures should this be necessary.
This includes:
Enactment of part or all of our Business Continuity Plans (BCP) for our organisation, which could include postponement of events and meetings, movement of work to alternative locations and/or movement of staff to alternative locations for the work to be performed;
- Reducing all non-essential travel and/or meetings.
- Potentially rescheduling any customer meetings or events (depending on location).
- Engagement with third-party suppliers over their readiness for dealing with a Coronavirus pandemic.
Infrastructure resilience and reliability
Creditsafe handles millions of users accessing content globally, across nearly 120,000 customers. Our infrastructure and security have always supported remote working and we are confident that we have sufficient measures in place to deal with a pandemic.
During COVID-19, as an extra precaution, we've enacted our Business Continuity plans to ensure core business functions and technology are operational in the event of any potential disruption. For more information on Creditsafe’s system status across all critical services, please visit status.creditsafe.com
Workforce resilience and business continuity
Keeping our operations running is critical to Creditsafe and our customers. Given our culture, work-from-home practices have always been part of normal business operations. We currently leverage a range of best-of-breed technologies for secure collaboration, video communication (Zoom), messaging (Slack), secure identity, and other critical cloud tools to deliver uninterrupted remote work for all employees. Out of an abundance of caution during COVID-19, we're supporting all employees, regardless of office location, to do be able to work remotely.
We have long recognised the potential risks associated with service interruptions due to adverse events, such as an earthquake, power outage or a public health crisis like COVID-19, affecting our business. This is why we have a Business Continuity Program in place to provide the policies and plans necessary for protecting our operations and critical business functions.
Our data, scores and predictive risk indicators.
As a trusted source of global company information, our customers depend on us to provide accurate, real-time risk information about their customers and suppliers. The Creditsafe scoring algorithm primarily looks at historic data and trends in order to assess the risk associated with a company (e.g. it’s financial performance, court judgments, payment history. etc). This information is used to derive a score based on the likelihood of that company becoming insolvent in the next 12 months.
We’re extremely proud of our ability to accurately predict company insolvencies; however, the recent outbreak of COVID-19 has meant we are witnessing trends that are impacting the ability for companies to operate in a way never before seen.
In order to continue to provide our customers with scores and PDs (probability of default) they can depend on, we will carefully monitor our scorecards and will adjust them if necessary as the situation develops.
As we continue to monitor the impact that the Coronavirus is having on a global scale, we will ensure our algorithms continue to perform and remain highly predictive. We also recommend that our customers take additional measures to ensure they reduce the risk of being disrupted by 3rd party suppliers and carry out extended due diligence when extending credit to new and repeat customers.
Health and safety for Creditsafe employees
We place the highest priority on the welfare of all Creditsafe employees, customers, and visitors. We have implemented several measures to ensure the health and safety of our community, including supporting remote work for all employees, suspending international travel and limiting non-essential domestic travel, reducing large customer events and gatherings, and improving health and hygiene across all office locations by maintaining sanitation supplies and encouraging an “if you are sick, stay home” mindset.
We will continue to monitor new developments as the situation unfolds and adapt our policies and communicate accordingly.
If you have any questions please contact your local Creditsafe office using the details found on this website.
The Creditsafe Team