How does Infolegale support companies?
We are two founding partners who created Infolegale in 2008: Frédéric Julien and myself. The goal was to inject value back into the business intelligence market for the benefit of users. Historically, companies have need for legal, capital and financial information about the partners they want to work with.
The ambition of the Infolegale group is therefore to allow them to perpetuate their business relationships. We help them identify third parties (customers, suppliers, partners) and assess the risks involved in entering into a relationship. Other activities also came to complete the initial positioning. They have been co-built with other companies in the market, to cover a higher type of risk and provide certain information expected by companies.
The company Sis ID, of which Infolegale is present in the capital, thus offers payment fraud security indicators. Collect and analyze the payment behavior of companies to fight, in a collaborative way, against the risk of fraud and bank identity theft. Another company, Conformitee, also owned by Infolegale, offers a platform dedicated to banks for collecting KYC (Know Your Customer) information within the framework of the LCB-FT regulations (Fight against Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism).
Finally, the management of customer accounts is one of our main concerns. As such, we evaluate the risk of insolvency of third parties with a 12-month default risk indicator. Our recent acquisition of Covline, a company specialized in credit risk and collection management software, allows us to support companies in the digitization of accounts receivable management. These various activities help us multiply information channels and to develop more relevant indicators.
What are the risks involved in business relationships?
Above all, you need to make sure that the third-party company is very trustworthy and not a fraud or scammer. Infolegale has established indicators to measure fraud risk incurred by approaching a particular company. Our platform also offers the possibility ofassess the solvency of a company.
In addition, it is important to ensure that the entry into a relationship complies with various regulations. I am thinking in particular of hidden occupational risk : every company must comply with the so-called due diligence obligations when choosing a supplier, but also regulations related to the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism and, since the entry into force of the Sapin 2 law, the obligation of compliance in terms of control of corruption risk, which obliges companies to carry out numerous procedures to assess the levels of risk in terms of corruption.
The geopolitical crisis we are going through and the sanctions imposed on many Russian companies and personalities in particular illustrate the need to continuously and reactively assess this type of risk.
Finally, and in order to offer global evaluation solutions to companies, we are already positioning ourselves to offer indicators in terms of cyber security and D.CSR evaluation.
How do you make this information accessible to businesses?
We offer solutions in SaaS (Software as a Service) modality. Thus, they provide access to all the information and indicators of the companies through an online platform, APIs and daily email alerts. This information is based on the collection and production of qualitative and discriminant data.
Initially, Infolegale is based on public sources such as the Sirene database of the Insee, the National Registry of Commerce and Companies (RNCS) published by Inpi, or the National Registry of Associations (RNA).
However, certain data, very interesting to know a company and its environment, and very discriminating to assess risks, do not appear in these public sources. That is why Infolegale also produces its own information.. For example, we create databases on companies’ capital linkages, balance sheet and statutory information, as well as reputation information. These are surveys carried out directly with companies or through collaborative collection.
In fact, Infolegale stands out for its collaborative information-gathering programs. with your ecosystem: our customers and partners, for example, provide us with information about payment behavior between companies. This method of data collection and processing requires specific knowledge of Infolegale. It is because this information is very discriminatory that the reports we distribute are relevant and the scores In companies more predictive.
We also collect the exhaustiveness of the legal facts published about the companies and their managers, thus reflecting all the movements that impact their activity. It is about collecting legal advertisements published in authorized media (newspapers and official publication sites). As such, Infolegale is a partner of all French press titles (print or digital) that publish legal notices. This is how we collect more than 80,000 annual editions and enter more than 1,300,000 announcements and events that we transcribe and add to the databases.
What are the steps after collecting or producing data?
Then, the data must be interpreted, analyzed, rectified and structured. From there, statistical analysis and artificial intelligence power indicators to anticipate risks. These indicators are returned in a simple way, in the form of scores: fraud score, solvency score, etc., the scoring methodologies being specific for each type of risk.
Due to solvency risk, for example, a score of 20 it is then assigned to all entities that have an economic activity, including those that are inactive (in this case, it is 0).
For the measurement of corruption risk, the legal assessment is scored from A to E, complemented by a reputation assessment through a score of 100. If a company scores less than 50, it means that at least one of the stakeholders (a manager, a beneficial owner, a shareholder, etc.) has been penalized for corruption or is on blacklists or sanctions lists. The company, if it wants to work with this entity, must then surround itself with important precautions to justify its decision to establish a commercial relationship before the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA).
What would you say to convince a company to use Infolegale?
Our information is differentiated by its quality and predictability. Its completeness and freshness allow companies to anticipate different risks. Assessing solvency risk, for example, is all the more valuable when we know that companies are granted 800,000 million euros in credits every year. That is three times more than bank credit assigned by French banks to companies. However, a quarter of corporate bankruptcies are due to late or non-payment, because the companies in question were unable to detect the deterioration of a company’s financial health.
Disposer of reliable and réactive information on its tiers is more important, compte tenu de la conjoncture: hausse du coût de l’énergie et des matières premieres, instabilité géopolitique, difficultés de recruitement, surendettement des entreprises lié aux PGE à reimburse… So many factors that cause an increase in failures and an upsurge in fraudulent behavior. Infolegale analysts have observed an increase of +16% in the last 12 months and +50% in the last quarter.
This is why more and more operational decision makers request information about companies to ensure their decision making. Therefore, agility is an integral part of our DNA. Also, since the start of the health crisis, we were able to quickly adapt our scoring models. A Covid-specific risk indicator has allowed companies to reassess their third-party portfolio risk levels.
Other indicators will have to be created or integrated to adapt our solutions to the changing context, and allow our clients to anticipate and not react. In addition, and thanks to the entry of the NextStage fund, which joined Infolegale in April 2022 during a financing round of 13 million euros, we were able to acquire Covline in May 2022. This allowed us to complete our solutions around the position of the client, and accelerate our development through the consolidation, in particular, of CSR and Cyber risk evaluation solutions, to Become the global French player in BtoB risk protection in SaaS mode.
This content was produced with SCRIBEO. The BFMBUSINESS editorial team was not involved in the production of this content.
Source: BFM TV
