TISCreport is an online platform with a bold ambition: to help end corruption, human rights abuses and environmental crimes.
It aims to deliver on this mission by shining a light on the companies that make up corporate supply chains using a range of data sources, especially those that take an open data approach.
Read on to find out about how OpenCorporates’ company data plays a key role in enabling TISCreport to promote transparency in global supply chains, and why, as TISCreport’s founder Jaya Chakrabarti MBE explained to us: “We could not deliver on our transparency mission without OpenCorporates’ data”.
What is TISCreport?
TISCreport is an online platform that brings together different data sources to help build a picture of the companies that make up global supply chains. It aggregates and connects supply chain data provided by companies themselves with unique company identifiers, as well as global business, human rights and compliance related datasets.
This enables its users to:
- Keep third parties accountable
The platform was launched in 2016 in response to the emergence of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act. Section 54 of this act requires companies with a UK footprint and who make above a certain turnover, to report every year on the steps they have taken to drive modern slavery out of their supply chains.
TISCreport aggregates these modern slavery statements, along with many other data sources, to provide companies who use the platform with a picture of what its third parties are doing in response to modern slavery and other environmental, social or governance (ESG) risks, so they can act accordingly.
- Understand the companies that make up their supply chains
“If we are to make an impact on modern slavery, we have to track supply chains” says Jaya. In line with this, the platform helps users to track relationships between companies and their buyers, suppliers, investors and other stakeholders. Companies use TISCreport to understand their own supply chains and the supply chains of their partners.
- Monitor & conduct due diligence on third parties
Buyers, suppliers, investors and regulators can search for a company and look at its track record on a range of environmental, human rights or other issues in TISCreport before making decisions about whether to buy from, invest in or work with them. Equally, where companies have declined to share information, “knowing that they have declined is also ‘data’ worth knowing as it encourages the buyer to dig deeper” says Jaya. - Detect supply chain and investment portfolio risks
This unique and growing source of non-financial risk data enables the organisations that are willing to look to see threats coming before they show in financial indicators.
Legal entity data: an essential foundation for the TISCreport platform
OpenCorporates’ data has proven critical to the building of the TISCreport platform. Jaya singled out three key reasons to explain why:
- We’ve done the difficult data aggregation & standardisation – so you don’t have to
OpenCorporates conducts the complex task of collecting, understanding and standardising data from official sources – so our users can instead focus on what they’re best at: building solutions to leverage insights with the data. “Without OpenCorporates’ data, we would have to go to every jurisdiction and ask them to give us the data OpenCorporates provides so that we could even operate” says Jaya.
This is one of the key reasons why OpenCorporates is so popular with those building tech or data platforms, as they often need a foundational layer of legal entity data to build on top of or reference when helping their users to conduct due diligence or analyse trends.
- Global coverage
“OpenCorporates is what enables us to be a global platform” says Jaya. “It identifies what data is available about legal entities in different jurisdictions and publishes it as open data”. OpenCorporates covers over 190 million companies in more than 130 jurisdictions around the world, making it the largest open company database in the world. - Coverage of companies of all sizes as structured data
OpenCorporates provides data on the complete set of companies that are incorporated in a given jurisdiction. This allows TISCreport’s users to gain insight throughout the different levels of a supply chain – which are more global than ever today.
“Many businesses will be quite happy to map the first tier in a supply chain within the UK and say ‘this is what we can reasonably report back’, but the lower tiers of their supply chain can often remain opaque to them” Jaya explains.
Since OpenCorporates’ data is structured, it also allows TISCreport to get “a good feel for where any gaps in the types of data provided are”, so they can look to fill them with other data sources.
An indicative dashboard from TISCreport illustrating how a company can keep track of the companies in its supply chain.
What’s next?
With modern slavery legislation expanding across the world, supply chain transparency and open data platforms like TISCreport and OpenCorporates will become even more useful.
After all, California’s Transparency in Supply Chains Act became effective back in 2012, Australia brought in a Modern Slavery Act in 2018, Canada is considering one, and the European Union is scoping new regulation on human rights due diligence.
Related links
- TISCreport
Find out more about TISCreport.
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