Expert Knowledge Collection
| 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. | Expert Knowledge Collection |
|---|---|
| Short description Informal and short human-readable definition of a concept. | Explore our curated collection of expert knowledge, featuring detailed articles and insights that cover our products, industry best practices, and essential business knowledge. Stay informed with up-to-date resources tailored to enhance your understanding of compliance, data quality, and risk management |
| Description Informal and comprehensive human-readable definition of a concept. | Welcome to our Expert Knowledge Collection, your go-to resource for in-depth articles, guides, and insights that provide a comprehensive understanding of our product offerings and the broader industry landscape. This collection features carefully curated content, covering everything from compliance regulations, VAT validation, and data quality best practices to fraud prevention strategies, ESG reporting, and sanctions management. Whether you're seeking technical knowledge or business insights, this hub offers valuable information to help you stay informed, make better decisions, and leverage our solutions to their fullest potential. Dive into expert-level knowledge and equip yourself with the tools needed to navigate today's complex business environment. |
Foundations - CDQ Data Sharing Platform
Data Sharing Approach
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.
Metadata and Standards
Ensuring data quality is crucial for businesses seeking to maintain compliance with ever-evolving legal, regulatory, and industry standards. In today’s global environment, adhering to dynamic data requirements is a continuous challenge, as these standards frequently change based on national regulations. As regulations vary by country, organizations must track and update their compliance criteria to ensure alignment across all jurisdictions they operate within.
Many countries offer official company information as Open Data; however, the absence of a standardized data model or provision method complicates the process of integrating this data into business operations. The Metadata and Standards initiative within the Data Sharing Community aims to address these challenges by identifying and aggregating global data requirements and reference data sources—whether Open Data or commercially sourced. Through this collaborative effort, businesses can ensure they have access to accurate, reliable, and standardized data that is critical for compliance and risk mitigation.
The Metadata and Standards focus on managing a wide variety of metadata types that support compliance, data quality, and standardization. These include:
- Administrative Area Metadata: This includes managed reference data for administrative areas, using language-specific terms and short names compliant with ISO 3166-2 standards. This ensures consistency in defining regions and administrative units across different countries and languages.
- Business Identifier Metadata: Managed reference data that captures types of business identifiers for each country, helping companies validate and track identifiers such as VAT numbers, business registration numbers, and tax IDs.
- Compliance Lists Metadata: A collection of managed reference data related to compliance lists used in sanction and watchlist screening services. This ensures businesses stay compliant by screening their partners and vendors against global and regional sanctions lists.
- Country Metadata: Managed reference data for countries, featuring language-specific names and short names based on the ISO 3166-2 standard. This helps standardize country references across different datasets.
- Data Quality Rules: Comprehensive documentation of data quality rules, including explanations and technical constraints. These rules validate business partner data to ensure it meets predefined quality and compliance standards.
- Legal Form Metadata: Managed reference data for legal forms, including official abbreviations and country-specific variations. This ensures businesses have the correct and standardized references for company legal structures across different regions.
- City Metadata: Managed reference data for localities, helping businesses validate and harmonize location data to ensure accuracy in address and regional reporting.
- Post Code Metadata: A standardized reference for postal codes across different countries. This metadata ensures that postal codes are accurate and follow country-specific formats.
- Postal Delivery Point Metadata: Managed reference data for postal delivery points such as Post Office Boxes. This data is crucial for identification, extraction, harmonization, and standardization of delivery points in various postal systems.
By leveraging this structured and standardized metadata, businesses can ensure compliance with complex and diverse regulatory frameworks, improve data quality, and streamline integration across global systems. The Metadata and Standards approach ensures that companies have access to reliable, high-quality reference data, enabling them to stay compliant, reduce risk, and make informed decisions.
Data Procedures
CDQ provides a comprehensive overview of country-specific data standards essential for compliance, legal registrations, and business operations. Each country's dataset includes details on trusted data sources, legal forms, regions, identifiers like VAT numbers, and critical data quality rules. By referencing this guide, businesses can ensure their data aligns with regulatory standards, avoiding risks of errors, misrepresentation, or non-compliance. This resource is ideal for professionals in finance, compliance, supply chain management, and global trade, offering a structured view of the most important country-specific data elements.
Data Quality Rules Management
Transformation of human-documented data requirements into executable data quality rules is mostly a manual IT effort. Changing requirements cause IT efforts again and again. Some checks, e.g. tax number validity (not just format!), require external services. Other checks, e.g. validity of legal forms, require managed reference data (e.g. legal forms by country, plus abbreviations). Continuous data quality assurance (i.e. batch analyses) and real-time checks in workflows often use different rule sets.
Data requirements and related reference data are collected and updated collaboratively by the Data Sharing Community. Data quality rules are derived from these requirements automatically. All data quality rules are executed behind 1 interface, in real-time. Batch jobs and single-record checks use the same rule set and can be integrated by APIs.
For proving that a data quality rule is content-wise correct we maintain supporting document(s) per data quality rule which share the rule's source. This could be:
- a public authority source
- any other trustful webpage
- a data standard of a specific community member
We manage the URL (if any), a screenshot of the relevant parts (if any) and the source's name (e.g. Community member data standard, European Commission, National ....) See Identifier format invalid (SIREN (France)) as an exemplary rule that was specified and implemented based on information provided by the OECD.
Entity Resolution
The CDQ Matching Engine is employed in all services where the goal is to find overlaps between one or more business partners in different datasets. The matching engine leverages a straightforward approach to identify duplicate records or entities within and across datasets. The method is rooted in the concept of entity resolution or identity resolution, which aims to determine whether different records represent the same real-world entity by comparing their attributes. The matching engine is leveraged particular in the following products:
- CDQ Lookup: Finding matching business partners in connected data sources
- CDQ Partner Guard: Record linkage enabling business partner updates, for example in the CDQ Data Sharing Pool
- CDQ Duplicate Guard: Identifying duplicates in a single dataset or across datasets
- CDQ AML Guard: Searching for matching entries in sanctions and watchlists
GDPR Compliance
CDQ checks a given business partner data record for evidence of personal information, such as the name of a natural person, and provides the probability that the record comprises such information. As indicators for personal information, the algorithm looks for specific identifiers such as a Business Registration Number (Germany) in DE starting with "HRA", specific legal forms such as e.Kfm. (i.e. sole proprietors), and known natural person names. For the name matching in the last step, a neuronal network is used which is trained by large lists of known company names and country-specific forenames and by feedback from the Data Sharing Community.
CDQ Lookup
Data Pool
The CDQ Data Sharing Community uses a collaboratively managed reference data repository. This incorporates the integration of external data sources for enriching or validating business partner and address data. Examples of available data sources are 316 countries (e.g. WORLD (World), AT (Österreich, Austria, Autriche, 奥地利), BE (Belgien, Belgium, Belgique, België, 比利时)), 993 legal forms (e.g. ), and 72 active business partner data sources (e.g. Data source CDQ.POOL, Data source VIES, Data source CH.UIDR).
CDQ Partner Guard
Data Observability
Customer and vendor data quality decreases, even if the data is not touched, e.g. due to address changed, M&A, or insolvencies. Keeping the data up-to-date manually is complex and high effort on a global scale. Commercial registers and other reference data sources have to be monitored continuously. And for countries without reliable reference data, data has to be researched business partner by business partner. The CDQ Business Partner Update Monitoring takes over the effort of manual update screening. Business Partner Updates are automatically collected and made available in an easy to analyze and integratable way.
CDQ manages a number of update monitoring data sources in addition to its Data Sharing Pool. In order to continuously collect updates for your records synched with the CDQ data mirror, linkage strategies are defined that uniquely link your record (in the data mirror) with the reference record in an update data source (see list of linkage strategies below). In rare cases where there is no unique linkage possible, fuzzy linkage might be applied.
The update data sources can be individually activated and are then continuously collected. Users can then fetch and filter updates on demand, e.g. daily, weekly, or monthly.
CDQ Tax Guard
EU VAT Validation
Validating EU VAT numbers is essential for businesses operating within the EU, as it helps ensure regulatory compliance, mitigates fraud risks, and prevents financial liabilities from incorrect VAT handling. The EU VAT Quick Fixes and DAC7 regulations mandate stringent due diligence, requiring businesses to verify their partners' VAT registration and linked bank accounts, particularly for cross-border transactions.
The CDQ Tax Guard supports these efforts by integrating data quality rules that streamline the validation of VAT numbers. This ensures that businesses accurately record VAT IDs, verify compliance with intra-community supply rules, and maintain exemption from VAT liabilities. Additionally, CDQ’s solution automates these checks, enabling organizations to handle high transaction volumes while staying compliant, reducing the risk of penalties and operational disruptions.
Validation of Global Tax and Business Identifiers
Validating global tax and business identifiers is essential for organizations that operate across borders, ensuring compliance with local and international tax regulations. Each country has its own system of business registration and tax identification, such as the UK VAT ID, Brazil’s CNPJ, Argentina’s CUIT, and Saudi Arabia’s VAT number. Failure to validate these identifiers can result in severe legal and financial repercussions, including penalties for incorrect tax handling, lost tax exemptions, or even involvement in fraudulent transactions.
CDQ Tax Guard provides automated validation for a variety of tax and business identifiers, ensuring that businesses can efficiently verify the accuracy of partner data. This includes checking tax registration numbers, verifying VAT statuses, and confirming linked bank accounts where applicable. By leveraging data quality rules, CDQ’s solution ensures that businesses are compliant with global regulations, reducing operational risks and enabling smoother transactions.
CDQ AML Guard
Sanctions and Watchlists Compliance
In today’s globalized economy, sanction and watchlist screening is critical for businesses to remain compliant with regulations and to protect themselves from legal, financial, and reputational risks. CDQ’s AML Guard provides a robust solution for this, offering access to risk-relevant lists from 90 countries, including major global sanction lists such as the United Nations Security Council, European Union, OFAC, and HM Treasury. The screening process helps businesses ensure they are not engaging with sanctioned individuals, entities, or vessels, thereby avoiding fines, loss of trade licenses, or reputational damage.