Transparency???

We're off to a new year and hopefully some new and more positive attitudes towards transparency when it comes to disclosure of basic business entity information. Or perhaps not???

We've been working closely with a number of our clients over the years to verify information about firms registered in "secretive" jurisdictions (that does not mean that they leak by the way). Many of these tend to be in warm climates (although CNBC recently conducted a poll and found that the most secretive jurisdiction on the planet happens to be a little over an hour plane ride South East of Toronto where I'm writing this now - take a look http://www.cnbc.com/id/33591918/?slide=16).

The fundamental problem that we all face in trying to learn about companies we might like to transact with is that many of them incorporate in jurisdictions where they have no obligation to tell anyone else that they even exist. And if these firms don't have to publish anything about themselves, you as a financial institution or client simply need to trust what they tell you. Who's going to argue? Indeed this is one of the reasons that firms incorporate in such jurisdictions.

So the question is this. In such a huge, interconnected, leveraged and complex global economy, shouldn't we adopt some very basic yet universal standards around transparency if we are to minimize the chances or at least impact of another economic crisis? For example, shouldn't it be necessary for every registration authority in every jurisdiction to publish on a read only website, at no cost to the viewing public, the legal name and registered address of all entities registered in their jurisdiction? And shouldn't that registration authority (the one that typically has the legal mandate to prosecure the owners of a firm should they lie) also inform the public if each entity registered with them is active or not? Companies House sets a nice example of this in the UK. This information is also consolidated on Avox's www.wiki-data.com where it has been multiply sourced from various authorities.

This basic data serves as a kernel for a lot of other information however that core bit of data, if reliable and maintained in each jurisdiction by the authority with penalty inflicting power goes a long way to helping everyone converge on what is real, accurate and up to date. We call this Authoritative Source Convergence or "ASC". It's not an Avox product but a general initiative which we are working on with our clients, partners and a growing number of willing Authoritative Sources. This basic level of disclosure is vital for universal business entity identification (read "the holy grail").

Let us (and everyone else for that matter) know if you are interested in joining this initiative. We believe it can make all the difference.

Ken

Democratization of Data (or not?)

I had an interesting conversation with someone who manages corporate customer data for a major investment bank last week. She said that she had read our blog and developed the impression that Avox was attempting to democratize entity data. In her opinion (and as it turns out, in mine), this alone is likely to degrade the overall quality level of the content.

After this discussion, it dawned on me that we had better be clear about our objectives at Avox, particularly as they relate to wiki-data.com:

1) Maximize the amount of productive "challenges" received that help us to improve quality of the data in wiki-data.com. Every challenge to records with an AVID will be verified by our expert team of analysts before being applied (assuming, of course, the challenge is proven correct). The "democratization" element of this activity equates to the opening up of a chunk of our content on wiki-data.com for the world to see and for anyone to challenge. BTW, the quality improvement benefits all our data vendor partner offerings too.

2) Provide a platform for others to link to and from. Our next release of wiki-data will incorporate additional identifiers from other firms. The AVID will be part of a URI for each entity enabling the technology community to efficiently leverage a single version of the truth. This will in turn attract more usage, more challenges, lower latency and increased accuracy.

3) Create a forum for anyone to comment on data records, propose changes in public and ultimately to add "non verified" data records which Avox or other firms can verify for clients. This is the big stretch and, if I'm honest, it's the iteration of wiki-data we are least certain about.

To be clear, Avox will never provide to clients data that has not been verified according to the terms of their service level agreements. We do however regularly get asked for large volumes of business entity data to facilitate marketing campaigns for example where data quality is not as important as it is for credit risk management or regulatory compliance. This is where information on millions of entities is sometimes required but the budget for procurement of this content is meager. Perhaps in these cases it is not necessary to have an independent and rigourous analysis performed on every entity at regular intervals and the community self checking mechanism is adequate. Moreover, a global community maintained model may be a great solution for a free and universal yellow pages capability (for example). Over time, more and more of these entities will be verified by expert third parties such as Avox and assigned identifiers as the market demands.

We don't have all the answers however our aim is to give you, the user community, a platform to access and use the content cheaply and efficiently. We are looking for your views and guideance on how to shape wiki-data.com to make it a more market friendly service that represents real value for you.

BTW, keep your eyes open for v1 of wiki-data.com later in September. You can check out Jonathan Lister's blog for progress - the software is opensource.

Ken

wiki-data.com

If I'm perfectly honest, this exercise has been more painful than anticipated.

We started out by planning to publish a "skinny" version of every record in our CORE (COrroborated, Remediated, Enriched) Avox database. Then we realized that a good chunk of these records had been verified over a year ago for clients wanting just a one time clean-up (some folks never learn...) so those records had a reasonable chance of being out of date. As it takes a good 10 minutes per record to recheck, trolling through hundreds of thousands of stale records would take too long and cost too much for this initiative. Given that we are making this content publicly available so everyone can look at it, we thought it would be risky to publish data we knew had a high probably of being out of date.

Then in the pared down database, we found a large number of records that were not unique "legal" entities. That is to say, they were branches, departments or funds which had been included for specific Avox clients at their request. So while these are valid records from their perspective, we've excluded them from wiki-data for now with a view to starting with pure legal entities.

Then we released the database to a small trial audience and, as expected, we received helpful feedback on some quality issues which we have been in the process of addressing. This is exactly what we had hoped for as every new set of eyes that looks at the content brings with them new perspective and knowledge. The community helps improve its own asset. We also received very helpful feedback from users including some of our own staff about the layout of the search facility, the results and the issue filing process.

Perhaps most interesting and encouraging was the fact that one of our competitors provided constructive feedback. Could it be that we may be able to work with eachother to jointly improve our mutual clients' data? Let's see.

So now we feel the database, although slimmed down quite a lot, is ready for broad public viewing and consumption. There will be out of date information. There may be some duplicate values. And yes, I expect there will be some outright errors. It's all expected. All we ask is that you tell us about any problems you find. You just need to click on the "Correction" button next to the record in question.

I know it's a bit of a pain however please do share your feedback/thoughts with respect to wiki-data on this blog. You can just email me if you prefer. We also have a LinkedIn group (Avox business entity discussion forum) set up.

Ken

Avox/Markit

We are tremendously excited about this new partnership with Markit. The amount of efficiency that can be gained by mutual clients is tremendous without even considering the amount of risk that can be driven out by ensuring consistent data and documentation.

The folks at Markit are very customer focused as are we so please let us know if you have any suggestions for improvement or enhancement of our joint service.

Ken