Steps to Vet a Company with Evrim Collect
Comprehensive company vetting is critical to avoid potential fraud, safeguard investments, mitigate foreign threats, and ensure alignment with ethical and sustainability goals. Leveraging open source data can provide you with insight into a company's credibility, stability, and overall reputation. Let’s break down how to effectively perform company vetting using publicly available information with Evrim Collect.
1. Retrieve Basic Identifying Information
With Evrim Collect, users create a custom template and attributes to collect business registration information including a company’s full legal name, registration details, and headquarters location. To direct Evrim Collect’s AI agents towards a specific business registration site, users have the option to include a URL. In the example below, we entered the UK Companies House business registration site since we are performing company vetting on UK-based companies.
2. Set Flags for Financial, Legal, and Compliance Issues
Sometimes when performing vetting, all you need is a quick check on whether or not a company has a history of risky activity. Setting flags in Evrim Collect is easy, just create Attributes with True/False as their value. When our AI Agents collect information they will resolve it to the True/False data type for you, provide comprehensive reasoning as to why the value was chosen, and provide the source for you to investigate the flag value further. Flagging within Evrim Collect streamlines company vetting and investigations to help you decide where you should focus your in-depth research.
3. Assess Reputation Online
Evrim Collect contains a powerful feature called ‘Relationships’ to return multiple results for a single query. You can leverage 'Relationships' to collect information from news outlets reporting negative news about the company. Doing so creates an automated feed of information that would have taken hours to capture and structure manually. Below is an example of Tesco, PLC’s negative news.
4. Investigate Leadership and Employees
Using the 'Relationships' attribute again but with a query to search for leadership, we can retrieve multiple company personnel. In the example below, we used this feature to collect the Tesco PLC company officers from their business registration documents. Users can export the data and easily import it into an analysis tool including I2 Analyst Notebook or Gephi. With these individuals, we can perform additional analysis into their personal risks and connections.
5. Ask Detailed Risk Questions
Sometimes you will want Evrim Collect to not only collect, but perform comprehensive analysis for you. Research questions are a great way to standardize comprehensive analysis across the companies you are vetting. Asking Evrim Collect to answer questions like the following can provide insight into a company’s credibility, compliance, political involvement, foreign ties, and financial health.
- Has this company experienced any cyber attacks or data breaches in the past 5 years?
- Does this company do business with foreign governments or companies?
- Can you perform a SWOT analysis on this company?
- Have any key leadership or the company expressed political leanings?
- How reliant is this company on China for parts and manufacturing?
Red Flags to Watch For
- Lack of Transparency: Difficulty in finding basic information or a reluctance to share details. Sometimes no data is a risk in itself, typically legitimate companies will have an online presence as well as a presence in business registration sites. It is important to check for both, if a company has a web presence (full website and social media accounts) but no business registration documentation, this could be an indicator the company did not file legal documentation to be doing business.
- Frequent Legal Troubles: A history of lawsuits or regulatory fines. Legal troubles place strain on a company’s financial state and can degrade their reputation. Since some industries are more litigious than others, it is important to examine other companies within the industry to understand if the level of legal trouble is normal or abnormal for the industry the company operates in.
- Negative Feedback: Consistent negative reviews regarding workplace culture, ethics, products, and services. Assessing both customer and employee reviews that trend negatively may provide insight into what doing business with this company is like. These reviews can sometimes reveal foreign involvement in the company as well (hiring preferences towards foreign-based employees) when corporate documentation does not.
- Frequent Cyber Attacks and Data Breaches: A strong security track record indicates that a company takes data protection seriously, while a history of breaches may suggest ongoing risks, regulatory violations, and reputation damage. Research cyber attacks and data breaches associated with the company to ensure that you are partnering with a secure, compliant, and trustworthy business.
How to Scale Your Vendor Vetting Process
Using open source data for company vetting empowers you to make decisions backed by facts and public insights. While extremely valuable, navigating open source data for company vetting requires time and expertise to do the job right. Scaling this process comes with difficulties like navigating to multiple sites (business registration sites, social media, news, and company websites), organizing data collected, performing source credibility analysis, and maintaining data structures to perform comprehensive analysis in the future. With Evrim Collect, AI Agents can do the heavy lifting on collection, data structuring, and source evaluation for your organization, leaving you with the most important job - making strategic decisions. Reach out to our team to connect about how Evrim Collect can address your business needs.