What is the one word that best characterises the company data market?
Uncertainty.
Traditional company data providers are increasingly consolidating – with acquisitions, buyouts and IPOs happening frequently. We observed this trend back in 2017, and recent examples suggest it has only accelerated:
- Moody’s Corporation acquired credit data provider Cortera in February 2021
- Dun & Bradstreet raised $1.7 billion in an IPO in June 2020 after having previously gone from being publicly traded to private in February 2019
Some company data providers have acquired other companies, others have been acquired. The cumulative effect of all this is uncertainty for those who rely on a stable foundation of company data to solve critical challenges such as underpinning tech platforms, maintaining data lakes, or investigating wrongdoing.
Why does this matter?
Many companies use company data at scale as the foundational source that powers their products, technology platforms or internal systems. If their provider undergoes a structural change, this could also bring change to those who rely on the data. As a result, their users may not be certain that the current terms under which the data was acquired will remain consistent.
This makes it more difficult to plan for the future.
How OpenCorporates is different
The OpenCorporates Trust and our unique corporate structure guarantee our public benefit mission.
Not only this, they provide confidence to all our users in several ways, as they mean that:
- Our public benefit mission ensures our data will always be openly accessible to anyone, and the ‘many eyes’ on our data creates a positive data-quality feedback loop.
- The current structure and mission of OpenCorporates provides certainty for the long-term.
- Users have greater transparency about our governance and decision-making processes.
These together set OpenCorporates apart as a company data provider, ensuring all our users have confidence in us, in the transparency of our data – and that we’ll never be diverted away from our public benefit mission.
After all, the fundamental purpose of corporate records data is to be consulted and reviewed so the public benefits. The above factors combined provide a stable structure to safeguard this.
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The OpenCorporates Trust
Find out more about the OpenCorporates Trust and meet the trustees who protect our public benefit mission: Patrick Alley, Esther Dyson, John Githongo, Mike Olson, Giannina Segnini and Jane Wales.
