Data Sharing
| Name Name of a concept, e.g. a data model concept. In contrast to terms, the name does not depend on a given context, e.g. a country-specific language. | Data Sharing |
|---|---|
| Short description Informal and short human-readable definition of a concept. | CDQ enables B2B data sharing with a focus on business partner data and mitigation of financial- and compliance risks based on collaboratively developed cross-industry standards |
| Description Informal and comprehensive human-readable definition of a concept. | CDQ’s data sharing approach enables businesses to collaborate on maintaining up-to-date business partner data and mitigating financial and compliance risks. Through a trusted network of user companies, CDQ facilitates the exchange of critical signals, such as updates to business partner data, fraud alerts (e.g., fake invoices, business email compromise), and trust scores for bank accounts based on the number of transactions. It also supports the anonymized sharing of email addresses for verification and provides metadata like country codes, legal form abbreviations, and street type abbreviations. |
Our Data Sharing Approach
What sets us apart is not only the unparalleled breadth of data sources and the focus on real-time data observability but also our innovative data-sharing approach. CDQ’s data sharing approach is designed to enhance business partner data quality by enabling collaboration across a trusted network of companies. This approach focuses on mitigating financial and compliance risks by providing real-time data updates, fraud alerts, trust scores for bank accounts, and the sharing of essential metadata. By leveraging cross-industry collaboration and automation, CDQ significantly reduces the effort required to maintain accurate, up-to-date business partner information.
Unlike traditional systems that rely solely on updates from official registries, which can often be delayed, our solution leverages a collaborative network of customers who share critical updates about their business partners. This network effect allows for faster dissemination of crucial information, such as changes in a partner’s legal status, business name, or operational status, even before such changes are officially recorded in business registries. This peer-driven data-sharing mechanism significantly enhances the speed and accuracy of risk detection, especially in regions where official data sources may be slow or unreliable. By participating in this collaborative ecosystem, our customers not only protect themselves but also contribute to a more resilient and informed business community.
Sharing of Business Partner Data Updates
CDQ continuously monitors and shares updates related to business partner information. This includes critical changes such as:
- Addresses: Regular updates to shipping, billing, and other business partner addresses, ensuring accuracy despite changes due to relocations, mergers, or closures.
- Legal Structures: Changes to a business’s legal form, including mergers, acquisitions, and entity name changes, are promptly shared.
- Tax Numbers and Business Identifiers: Updates to essential business identifiers like tax numbers, VAT numbers, and registration details, ensuring compliance with national and international regulations.
- Entity Status: Whether a business partner is inactive, dissolved, or undergoing changes, CDQ alerts subscribers to ensure that outdated or inaccurate data is flagged.
These updates are shared via a subscription model, allowing businesses to receive automated updates based on their chosen frequency—daily, weekly, or on demand. By tapping into various data sources—public, restricted, and community-based—users can ensure their records are continuously aligned with the latest information. See the corresponding product CDQ Partner Guard.
Advantages of our Approach
- Accelerated Update Detection: Through shared data, customers are informed of critical changes often much faster than waiting for updates to be reflected in official business registries. Reduces the time window in which a business might be exposed to risks, enabling quicker reactions and better decision-making.
- Enhanced Coverage in Challenging Markets: In countries or regions where official and trusted data sources are scarce or non-existent, this data-sharing approach ensures that critical updates are still reliably covered. Expands the solution’s effectiveness globally, providing comprehensive risk coverage even in markets with limited access to authoritative data.
- Community-Driven Intelligence: The collective intelligence of a networked customer base creates a powerful and dynamic source of information, beyond what any single data provider can offer. Increases the overall reliability of the data, giving businesses confidence that they are operating with the most current and accurate information available.
- By incorporating this unique data-sharing approach, our solution not only mitigates risks more effectively but also fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility among our customers.
Fraud Alerts and Risk Mitigation
One of the primary benefits of CDQ’s data sharing is fraud detection and prevention:
- Warning Signals for Fraud Attacks: CDQ sends alerts related to potential or confirmed fraud activities, such as fake invoices or business email compromise (BEC). These signals are derived from the collective intelligence gathered by CDQ's network of participants.
- Business Email Compromise (BEC) Detection: Through the anonymized sharing of email addresses, CDQ supports verification and identifies compromised email accounts, mitigating the risk of BEC attacks.
The collaborative nature of CDQ allows users to benefit from shared insights on fraud risks, leveraging the collective vigilance of the entire community. See the corresponding product CDQ Fraud Guard.
Bank Account Usage and Trust Scoring
Bank account verification is crucial for secure transactions, and CDQ supports this by:
- Sharing of Verified Bank Account Data: CDQ allows companies to share bank account details with verified accuracy, creating a more reliable network of business partners.
- Trust Scores for Bank Accounts: CDQ calculates trust scores for bank accounts based on the number of transactions processed through them. These scores provide an indication of the legitimacy and reliability of a bank account, reducing the risk of fraud when making payments to new or unknown partners.
This bank account verification system helps businesses minimize financial risks and ensure more secure transactions with their partners. See the corresponding product CDQ Fraud Guard.
Metadata Sharing
CDQ’s data sharing also includes the exchange of key metadata, which standardizes and validates business partner data. This includes among others:
- Country Codes and Legal Form Names: Consistent country codes and legal form names ensure that data is standardized across different regions, reducing the likelihood of errors.
- Street Type Abbreviations: Standardized terms for street types, such as “St.” for “Street,” ensure consistency in address formats across datasets.
- Administrative Area Data: Sharing administrative area information, such as states and provinces, following ISO standards.
Additionally, CDQ shares data quality rules, allowing companies to validate their business partner data against cross-industry standards. These rules help ensure consistency, accuracy, and compliance with local regulations.
Scope and Definition
Business Partner
- §1 A business partner
- is a legal entity with which a CDQ data sharing member has or potentially could have a contractual relationship regarding the exchange of digital/physical goods or services (i.e. business partner of type legal entity)
- an entity which has characteristics defined by the CDQ Data Sharing Community (see §2) that make it valuable to treat it separately from the legal entity (i.e. business partner of type organizational unit)
- an entity that does not fall into above categories but represents a particular location/address that is used for operational tasks such as bill-to addresses (i.e. business partner of type operational entity)
Business Partner: Organizational unit
- §2 We define the following entities as organizational units
- Establishments of a legal entity that are uniquely registered in an official business/company register of a country
- France: Establishments (etablissement) that are assigned a unique SIRET number are treated as organizational units
- Belgium: Establishments (vestigingseenheid) that are assigned a unique branch number
- Switzerland: Establishments (Zweigniederlassung) that are assigned a [[Company identification number (Switzerland)|Swiss UID]
- [Further definitions of organizational units will be added here in future and are subject of acceptance by the CDQ Data Sharing Community
- Establishments of a legal entity that are uniquely registered in an official business/company register of a country
Example
Specific locations of a legal entity are in some countries officially registered, e.g. so called permanent establishments (German: Betriebsstätte) or branches. These locations usually have a unique identifier, e.g. in France the SIRET number (composed of the SIREN that uniquely identifies the legal entity + additional digits). Such registered locations (and initially only these) will be managed as organizational units of a legal entity in the case of France (see §2).
The registered address of the organizational unit is typified as REGISTERED ADDRESS a special case of the type LEGAL ADDRESS. An organizational unit is linked to a legal entity and is treated itself like a business partner of type legal entity. This means there are e.g. collaborative reviews on updates for an organizational unit
Business Partner: Operational entity
- §3 We define the following entities as operational entity
Data Model
The CDQ data model defines the data which is collaboratively shared and maintained in our Shared Data Pool. The model is subject of continuous discussion and extension. The table below provides an overview on the main concepts:
| Has description | |
|---|---|
| Address (CDQ.POOL) | An address provides information about the physical location of a business partner. It can be specialized in a certain context: e.g. delivery address or invoice address. |
| Address Context (CDQ.POOL) | The address context provides us with some additional information about the usage or specific recipient information of the addresses. It may hold multiple information organized as "tags". |
| Address Function (CDQ.POOL) | Documents the way an address is used e.g. at different CDQ user companies. For example, a business partner's address may be a Ship To Address (CDQ.POOL) for one of its business partners but a Bill To Address (CDQ.POOL) for another user. There is no direct use of this information in our services yet but may be used in future for data analysis and data validation purposes. |
| Address ID (CDQ.POOL) | Unique identification of an address of a business partner |
| Address Type (CDQ.POOL) | An address type characterizes an address. The type of an address is a structural statement and provides a truth that is applicable to any user (e.g. a legal address is a fact, or that an address is a PO BOX address), other than address functions that may differ from user to user. Address functions determine the particular business context in which an address is in use. For example, a business partner's address may be a address/type/ship to for one of its business partners but a address/type/bill to for another business partner. |
| Address version (CDQ.POOL) | CDQ supports multiple versions of addresses comprising different charsets and languages. An address version is a unique combination of a character set and a language. |
| Premise (CDQ.POOL) | A premise is a tract of land including its buildings. A premise may have several sub-levels to precisely identify e.g. a address/premise/type/room in a address/premise/type/building. |
| Administrative Area (CDQ.POOL) | A top-level geographical or political area division in a country. |
| Bank Account (CDQ.POOL) | A bank account record holds information that universally describes a registered bank account. |
| Business Partner Category (CDQ.POOL) | A business partner/category of a business partner groups similar business partners, e.g. a business partner/category/hotel or business partner/category/hospital. |
| Business Partner External Context (CDQ.POOL) | Describe own identifiers of a record (others than just the external Id), e.g. LIFNR, KUNR and BPNR in the mirror |
| Business Partner Name (CDQ.POOL) | The business partner name identifies a business partner. There are different types of names. |
| Business Partner Profile (CDQ.POOL) | A business partner profile contains important information about a company, such as its classification, tags, contact details, or minority indicator. |
| Business Partner Relation (CDQ.POOL) | Also known as business partner hierarchy, or any other kind of relation between two business partner entities.
The relation is separated from the Business Partner concept. The data about relationships between companies comes from official, external data sources. Relations based on the four foundational attributes:
|
| Business Partner Status (CDQ.POOL) | Describes the status of a business partner with respect to its level of activity (e.g. out of business) or legally relevant conditions (e.g. in liquidation) |
| Business Partner Type (CDQ.POOL) | A distinct type a business partner is assigned to. It determines the business context a business partner is involved in. In the Corporate Data League, most business partners are legal entities. |
| CDQ Business Partner External ID (CDQ.POOL) | Arbitrary identifier type to mark customer IDs which are "external" from CDQ's perspective. This is the identifier a customer provides to identify her records, e.g. the ID she manages in her SAP systems. |
| CDQ Business Partner ID (CDQ.POOL) | A CDQ ID identifies a business partner uniquely in the context of the Corporate Data League. |
| Care Of (CDQ.POOL) | Signifies an intermediary who is responsible for transferring a piece of mail between the postal system and the final addressee. For example, when the addressee has no standard address, is under a corporate mail system, or is being manually forwarded mail sent to a more accessible location. |
| Country (CDQ.POOL) | A controlled political state, nation, or territory. CDQ's definition of a country simplify follows the list of two-letter codes from ISO standard 3166 and manages metadata for these countries in this wiki. |
| Geographic Coordinates (CDQ.POOL) | Geographic coordinates identify uniquely a location on the Earth. In the Corporate Data League context, geographic coordinates identify addresses. |
| Global Trade Item (CDQ.POOL) | An item or product |
| Identifier (CDQ.POOL) | Identifies a business partner in a given context uniquely. For example, a VAT identification number may identify a business partner uniquely in a national (or larger) context. |
| Identifying Address Name (CDQ.POOL) | A identifying name assigned to an address. In most cases the identifying name refers to the name of a registered agent. |
| Legal Form (CDQ.POOL) | The legal form of a business partner/type/legal entity is the form it takes in the eyes of the law governing it. The legal form of a company is the general type it may legally use to identify itself according to the local, regional, national, or international law governing it. This is normally reflected in the ending abbreviation after the company's name (e.g. AG, Inc., LLC, S.A.). |
| Locality (CDQ.POOL) | A locality is a named densely populated area (a place) such as town, village, suburb, etc. A locality composes of many individual addresses. Many localities exist in an administrative area. A locality can also have several levels of sub localities. |
| Opening Hours (CDQ.POOL) | |
| Post Code (CDQ.POOL) | A country specific code for a certain address component or an combination of address components, e.g. address/locality. |
| Postal Delivery Point (CDQ.POOL) | A single mailbox or other place at which postal mail is delivered. |
| Thoroughfare (CDQ.POOL) | Details of the access route along which buildings, lots, or land are located, such as street, road, channel, crescent, avenue, etc. This also includes canals or banks on which houses or boat houses are located where people live. |
General Rules
Not all business partners managed by a CDQ Sharing Member is applicable for sharing. There are certain prerequisites that have to be met:
- There are transactions with the partner. This means the corresponding record was used in a business process.
- The business partner is active. Records that are no longer in use at a user company are to be excluded. Typically, records become inactive when the business partner is out of business, has changed/renamed, or there are internal reasons like that the record is a duplicate.
- No one time vendors.
- No special security class. I.e. records that comprise anonymized names or that are per se incomplete due to security reasons .
- The business partner is not marked for deletion or flagged as duplicate.
- No natural persons. No employee data or any other natural person data (e.g. consumers) is shared. CDQ ensures this additionally by technical measures (see e.g. the Identification of Natural Person Data). Please refer also to the data privacy policy, where it is also defined that sole proprietors and partnerships are not per se excluded.
- At least one address is provided. If there is just one address it has to be then necessarily the legal address, i.e. an address which is officially registered with the business partner
- All addresses can be shared. Any other address of a business partner can and should be shared (also pure ship-to or bill-to addresses)
Business Partner Updates: Data Sharing Process
Sharing business partner updates and thereby being notified earlier about changes, resolving more efficiently data defects while saving data maintenance and research effort is the major value proposition of CDQ's Business Partner Data Sharing Approach. The collaboration process and the corresponding required steps by a sharing participant can be losely structured as follows.
Sharing Setup
- Activate update retrieval from the CDQ.POOL (or other data sources). Please note updates from the CDQ.POOL require active participation in the sharing process in terms of sharing updates on the data as well.
- In order to retrieve updates the participant's records have to be first subscribed to existing records in the CDQ.POOL. In order to activate the sharing, records are disclosed for sharing. As an automated linkage of disclosed records with the CDQ.POOL is not always possible due to fuzzyness or severe data quality defects, there are report(s) that allow for analyzing the subscription status. For disclosed and subscribed records any update provided by the sharing member in its Data Mirror is shared with the CDQ.POOL and thus with all other sharing participants that have subscribed to the identical record.
Subscription Management
Subscription Management provides businesses with the ability to disclose records from a private data mirror for inclusion in the Update Sharing Process. Only the records explicitly marked as disclosed are shared within the CDQ Community Data Pool. Additionally, it defines how records in a private mirror are linked to the CDQ.POOL. To minimize inconsistencies caused by fuzzy matching, the linkage is typically based on a specific identifier for each country. In cases where a specific identifier is either unavailable or impractical (e.g., identifiers not managed by standard SAP installations, or when identifiers such as EU VAT numbers do not uniquely identify a business partner), fuzzy record linkage configurations are also supported.
Subscription Management allows users to review which records were successfully linked to the CDQ.POOL, which new records were created, and which records were not linked. Reasons for non-linkage may include missing identifiers, low-confidence matches in fuzzy linkage strategies, or data quality issues that prevent the record from passing the Data Sharing Quality Gate.
Linkage Strategies for Supported Countries
Sharing Operations
- The Data Sharing Quality Gate ensures that no obviously defective or otherwise problematic records and updates are propagated to the CDQ.POOL. An update on a record which does not qualify as valid according to the data quality checks is not shared. Information about such issues can be found in the subscription reports and the regular data quality profiling reports.
- Any update that comes from a sharing participant and was not rejected by the Quality Gate is distributed to the CDQ.POOL. Based on the number of updates that are taken over by individual sharing participants, in other words updates that are implicitly confirmed, (i.e. data was updated according to this update in the data mirror) and additional confirmations of an update by external monitoring data sources, an update score is calculated which allows to judge on the reliability of the update.
Data Sharing Quality Gate
The Quality Gate ensures that no obviously defective or otherwise problematic records and updates are propagated to the CDQ.POOL. An update on a record which does not qualify as valid according to the data quality checks is not shared. A client's records which such data quality issues can be found in the subscription reports and the regular data quality profiling reports for further analysis or correction.
The Data Sharing makes use of the data quality rules. All data quality rules are executed, records with rule violations of a criticality of ERROR or WARNING will not pass the Quality Gate. The current set of rules per country can be researched and analyzed using the CDQ data maintenance procedures.
Additionally in this context the Quality Gate performs checks for natural person data. Even if there was no data defect found for a record, the record will not pass the quality gate in case the CDQ natural person identification catgorized the record as representing a natural person.
You can get an overview on the definition of the quality gate for a particular country with the following form:
Update Retrieval and Statistics
- Updates from the CDQ.POOL, and from any other activated monitoring data source, are available for data sharing participants via technical interfaces for reading the updates and loading them e.g. into local workflows for data update requests.
- Reports and Dashboards in the CDQ Cloud Apps allow for retrieving statistics and filtered updates in a user friendly way.