Unified Global Due Diligence & Onboarding

Abstract

Global due diligence of third parties has never been more critical. To that end, Basel Peace Network has launched a “Unified Global Due Diligence” project that approaches the due diligence of third parties through an innovative combination of financial analysis, technology, human behavior, and understanding of markets through Draft 2, which is significantly an improvement over the Draft 1. The financial side of the project revolved around extracting key ratios and indicators which can be used to gauge a company’s financial health, or risk. The trust score model, based on several parameters like financial performance, compliance, legal status, and operations was also built. It was interesting to use APIs to extract relevant data for this project. The survey, conducted for this project, provided valuable information from a marketing perspective about how companies approach due diligence, their experiences and issues encountered, and their perceptions of potential integrated functionality offered by an enhanced system. This information identified potential solutions that currently are not met by existing due diligence practices and methods. The psychology perspective to the problem looked realistically at how decisions are actually made and included factors such as risk perception, trust in tools, and regular user behavior in the design of the tool. The project progressed well from a technical perspective. A robust and scalable system has been developed which integrates APIs, automates a number of processes and includes a structured and populated dashboard which will reduce the manual efforts required and enable due diligence to be conducted much faster. Although the project encountered some hurdles along the way, such as limited collaboration from APIs and ambiguity with the cost of the APIs, the project ultimately found alternative APIs and made strategic decisions that led to a lot of learning while trying to manage uncertainty and make the best of the options at hand. From the perspective of various stakeholders, the implications of this project are numerous. For organizations, businesses, and industry verticals, this project means that there are now effective and reliable means to measure the risk of third-parties and make informed decisions to prevent fraud and other operational risks. For procurement professionals and decision-makers, this means that the loads of data associated with third-party risk can be consolidated and distilled into a single, easily-understood “trust score” to inform real-time decisions. For those in the business of developing software and platforms for third-party risk management, this work underscores the importance of building on scalable technology and integrated real-time data sources. From a regulatory and compliance perspective, this technology supports improved compliance by ensuring that all parties are thoroughly vetted before they are granted access to sensitive information. This project develops new analysis and data on the financial, behavioural and technological factors that drive the production and consumption of news. This effort provides a strong foundation for a due diligence platform that can help companies make more informed decisions. Moving forward, we'll work to integrate the additional APIs, enhance the trust score model, and generally harden the site for deployment.