Protecting your company is paramount in this day and age. A lot of potential business partners have a questionable history and methods. If you enter a partnership with some of them, you will risk damaging your reputation beyond repair. corma offers corporate investigations to businesses worldwide. Business partner screening will enable you to make smart business partnership decisions and protect your company.
If you decide to choose corma to plan, manage, and execute your business partner background check, you will receive a complete report in German and/or English. The report contains a complete background check data ranging from verification of company name and analysis of available corporate documents to research in national and international business databases and internet research of target company.
Do you have any suspicion regarding your future business partner? Choose Business Partner Due Diligence with corma to investigate any German company.
Do you want to have a company outside of Germany investigated? Feel free to contact us and send your request!
You will receive a complete report 7–12 business days after order confirmation.
Why Is Business Partner Screening Important?
Choosing a business partner is not an easy thing to do. When you enter a partnership, your reputation and brand image merge with those of your partner. If your business partner runs a shady operation, hires workers without running background checks, or has a history of doing things “differently,” you will expose your company to various risks.
Every company’s goal is to show itself in the best possible light when looking for a partner. If you make your partnership decision exclusively on this information, the chances are that you are in for a surprise. This is where business partner screening comes in as your reputation savior.
If you have a business partner background check done by professionals, such as corma GmbH, you will access all the important information. It’s the only viable way of vetting business partners while being certain that nothing from their past or present, such as financial, ethical, or legal misconduct, will come to haunt you.
Business Partner Due Diligence with corma GmbH
corma GmbH is not a new player in the corporate investigations niche. The company was founded in 1999. Thanks to our decades-long experience, we can deliver the most comprehensive business partner due diligence investigation services. We have access to a wide network of investigators, state-of-the-art tools, and expertise to run deep background checks.
Our team of certified experts has managed to refine the business background check process to ensure not one bit of information slips through your fingers. Our comprehensive corporate investigation process covers the following areas:
- Verification of company data in public registers
- Analysis of available corporate documents, company news, and annual reports
- Research in national and international business databases
- Identification of shareholders, management, board members, and executives
- Identification and verification of the beneficial owner or persons with significant control
- Identification and background check of company holdings and affiliated companies
- Verification that the target company and everyone involved is on integrity-related lists
- Verification that top managers and beneficial owners are listed as Politically Exposed Persons
- Queries of national insolvency databases
- Internet research and investigation
- Domain and DNS intelligence databases (current and historical domain registration and IP and website research)
- Media research
We will send you a complete report so that you can make a data-driven business partner vetting decision.
Access to Premium National and International Business Databases
Here at corma, we have a unique approach to the business partner background check process. In our efforts to compile the most complete reports, we decided to gain access to premium databases. These databases are not available to everyone. Thanks to our reputation and connections in the industry, we have access to large business databases. It enables us to deliver the most accurate and top-notch information.
With the leading premium databases at our disposal, we can uncover relationships between people and companies and run background checks to uncover historical data. corma can also use the databases to visualize entire networks and identify all company holdings and affiliated companies. We can extend the background check to identify otherwise undetectable red flags.
If you are vetting international and multinational companies, we can identify cross-border corporate structures and run background checks on each one of them. Finally, premium databases enable us to identify the ultimate beneficial owner to make sure absolutely nothing can backfire at you once you enter a new partnership.
Investigative Due Diligence in the MENA Region
Are you looking to enter a partnership with a business headquartered in the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa)? We are happy to inform you that we have exclusive access to the largest company, director, and shareholder database for the MENA region, thanks to our connections.
Whether it is a single company or a group, we can run extensive investigative due diligence on your behalf. We will do a background check, research all media reports, and check the company’s integrity to help you discover any hidden risks associated with the company or group.
The above-mentioned database enables us to include the following elements in our investigations:
● Obtain official company information
● Obtain publicly available financial data
● Perform political associations and connections screening
● Audit global and local compliance and section lists
● Adverse media in local and different languages
● Perform business interest checks of the company and up to three shareholders and three directors
● Perform directorship checks of the subject in other local companies
● Deliver background, business network and relationship, executive risk, and business intelligence analysis
Empower Your Team with Dedicated OSINT Training
If you have the internal resources to run the business partner screening but lack the knowledge and expertise, corma offers you a way to overcome this challenge. We have an ongoing OSINT training program to help companies develop their own investigative capacities.
Our OSINT training program was developed to help you master the OSINT investigation process and learn special workflows on how to conduct business partner checks.
For your convenience, we can deliver OSINT training on-site and/or live online. If you have any special training requirements, we are standing by to offer you a customized video training channel.
Vet your potential business partners today! Contact corma to discuss your business screening needs and get actionable insights within 7-12 business days!
FAQ
Business partner screening is an investigation that companies use to vet businesses or individuals and identify potential legal, financial, or ethical red flags. The investigation provides details about a prospective business partner’s background and helps create a detailed third-party profile.
Investigative due diligence can help you find out if a potential business partner has a criminal record, if they are involved in any outstanding legal matters in court, and other meaningful information. It can help you assess and minimize potential risks across your organization.
To gather relevant information, you need access to various business databases and other tools for collecting and analyzing data from external sources. That’s where an investigation agency like corma GmbH comes in.
We have access to premium national and international business databases. Our meticulous investigators know how to obtain crucial information legally and gain insights for our clients. With our extensive business partner screening services, you’ll know everything about a third party before starting a project or company with them.
PEP lists are databases that contain background information about politically exposed persons. They are collections from various publicly accessible lists, such as from governments.
Sanction lists include sanctioned nations, organizations, or individuals. They may be involved in criminal financing or other illegal activities or simply restricted from cooperating with companies or citizens of a particular country.
Watchlists include individuals or organizations that are under close surveillance for legal or political reasons. They often can’t travel by air or sea or go through thorough screening at airports, as they can’t get a visa or permission to enter a country that has them on a watchlist.
Blacklists include individuals, countries, or other entities that are regarded as untrustworthy or unacceptable and should be avoided or excluded. For instance, a person can get on a blacklist for credit after declaring bankruptcy.
Business partner screening includes checking these and other relevant lists to ensure a particular third party isn’t on them.
An ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) is an entity or person who is the ultimate beneficiary of a company. That can be someone with at least 25% stake in the capital, at least 25% voting right, or a beneficiary of at least 25% of the company’s capital.
Financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies, and investment companies, must have an ultimate beneficial owner and publicly disclose their UBO information. The most important reasons for doing so include preventing money laundering and preventing criminal financing.
A UBO check is mandatory for every company under the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) laws obligation. Failing to perform a UBO check before starting a partnership could hurt your reputation and drive you into legal trouble if your partner is involved in fraudulent transactions.
Third-party due diligence includes a UBO check, which audits a particular company’s ultimate beneficial owner or shareholder to see if they pose a legal, financial, or ethical threat.
OSINT stands for open-source intelligence. It can refer to any information about an individual or organization that you can gather from publicly available sources. It can also refer to the practice of gathering information from publicly available sources.
Those sources can be both online and offline, such as newspaper articles and public library books. They can also be free or subscription-based, which may or may not be free.
OSINT is a huge part of our corporate investigation services here at corma GmbH. It’s an essential part of our internet investigations and our online and offline research into third parties. Proper business partner screening is not complete without implementing multiple methods for collecting and analyzing open-source intelligence.
At corma GmbH, we use state-of-the-art OSINT tools for extensive online research and investigation. They enable us to collect relevant data about third parties and determine if they pose any threat to our clients’ organizations.
KYC stands for “Know Your Customer”. It refers to guidelines that financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, need to follow when opening accounts for their customers. They need to obtain and verify each customer’s identity and address to ensure the customers don’t potentially misuse their financial services.
KYC procedures help financial organizations better understand their customers’ financial situations. That enables them to manage their risks better and improve their services. KYC procedures also help prevent money laundering and other criminal activities. They are a legal requirement of every company that must comply with the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
The key components of KYC compliance include the customer identification program (CIP), customer due diligence (CDD), and continuous monitoring. They help ensure that a person is who they say they are, check their financial activities to ensure they are not fraudulent, and assess any potential legal or financial risk the person may pose.
KYC procedures are critical for effective business partner screening and monitoring of high-risk individuals or entities.
Entity is a commonly used word in the business world lingo. Many people use it interchangeably with a company. Since you will find it often in the corporate ownership research report, it is important to know the difference between company and entity. Entity is a broader term than company – it’s a word that encompasses various institutions, the company included.
For instance, the entity can refer to public authorities, trusts, partnerships, not-for-profits, and charities. Many entities have similar and, in some instances, the same names. That is why, here at corma, we use premium business databases – the databases in question list all entities with unique IDs. Thanks to IDs, we can quickly identify and verify every entity. It is also important to note that it’s easy to recognize entities in the financial services sector.
The field is regulated by the Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF). Entities in this sector are given an internationally recognized legal entity identifier (LEI).
Every company, despite its size, generates a significant amount of documents. Knowing various company documents types, their use-case, why they are issued, and why they are important is vital when running a business background check. There are well over ten business documents that you should know about and what information you can gather from them. The most noteworthy ones include:
Invoices – invoices contain valuable data on billing for services and products. They provide insight into a company’s financial operations and can help you assess the quality of financial processes within an organization.
Business license – to operate a business, you need to apply for a license or permit. A business license contains very important information such as business type, address, what the business sells, etc.
Commercial register documents – these documents reveal who is the managing director and shareholders for corporations and companies.
Memorandum of association – it’s one of the most important documents. It contains important information such as the company name, capital, objectives of the company, the liability of members, limitations, and powers.
Every business has to be registered at an address. The question is how you can validate the business address and make sure that it isn’t fake. There are many ways to do it, but the most common ones include:
- 1. Look for business address information in the documents in the commercial register, for instance, transfer of registered office;
- 2. Do an online research;
- 3. Check the business on-site;
Once you have all this information at your disposal, you can easily cross-reference it to validate business addresses. Checking the business on-site may be challenging if you are investigating a business in a foreign country or a different continent. That is why corma has a wide network of investigators ready to help you validate business addresses in Germany, Europe, and worldwide.
