Compliances teams are often faced with a challenge of how to get a 360-degree view of corporate clients, particularly when they are large multinationals with complex structures.
A company could be in contact with various people across various departments, divisions and product lines. This creates a view of client hierarchies that don’t align and differ from that of external data sources.
This leaves the challenge of collating the data across internal and external systems to build a complete 360 picture of client relationships. Once this has been established, firms then face trouble ensuring it is up-to-date with mergers and acquisition activity.
Quantexa has released a report on how companies can create a 360 view of complex corporate clients.
Managing hierarchies in isolation
The report states that large corporate or multinational clients are composed of many different legal entities, which are connected based on some form of ownership. A company could have relationships with various parts of the corporate group and at varying hierarchical levels.
Companies typically manage these relations in isolation without seeing how the information connects to the overall client relationship. This could lead to situations where a sales team might view client hierarchy in a completely different manner to the legal team.
It said, “When it comes to connecting those two views together, you want to know who you’re selling to but also who you’re getting your revenue from and who you’re contracting with. These views are often misaligned because of the different perspectives of the hierarchies across your different departments. Trying to get a client 360 view of a relationship and information from different departments is difficult because it involves an overwhelming amount of manual work.”
Making things harder, hierarchies can change over time.
Problems with traditional and rigid approaches
Quantexa stated that some organisations are connecting external data to provide guidance around a company’s hierarchy, based on information around an M&A, company closure or other business update.
Unfortunately, this still brings challenges. When facing poor data quality or misalignment between internal views and external views of hierarchies, this approach of traditional matching results in excessive undermatching or over matching.
Furthermore, Quantexa explained that having a rigid approach requires a certain view of hierarchy. If another department needs it, the company will make a copy for the specific need. This can leave multiple copies floating around with various differences.
How to build a 360 view and why
Quantexa outlined three easy steps to follow to establish a 360 view. The first is to build a single view of client entities and link to external sources. Next, a company needs to generate flexible hierarchies that are based on network generation to connect entities with their hierarchical information. Finally, the company should leverage graph analytics to derive unique insights.
There are many reasons why a 360 view is beneficial. Some of the key reasons are a consistent view of clients, easier identification of opportunities, better access to external data changes and improved visibility of relationships.
Read the full report here.
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