Knowledge corner
Welcome to the CDQ Knowledge Corner, your central hub for understanding the concepts, methods, and technologies behind trusted business partner data. This collection explains how CDQ’s solutions work and why they matter. It connects business goals such as compliance, efficiency, and AI readiness with the technical foundations that make them possible.
Here you will find concise, practical explanations of core topics in CDQ's data management and data sharing ecosystem. Each section introduces a key concept—such as identifier validation, sanctions screening, or data observability—and links it to the CDQ products and services that implement it.
The Knowledge Corner helps you:
- Understand how CDQ's data sharing model works and why it creates network effects for data quality.
- Explore how metadata, identifiers, and observability ensure reliable and compliant business partner information.
- Learn how CDQ products like Partner Guard, Tax Guard, and AML Guard automate validation and compliance tasks.
- Discover how organizations use shared, high-quality data to prepare for an AI-driven future.
Together, these resources provide both technical and business context, helping you see how CDQ enables collaboration on accurate, compliant, and continuously improving data.
Data Sharing at CDQ
CDQ's data sharing model enables enterprises to collaborate securely on maintaining accurate and up-to-date business partner information. Within a trusted network, companies exchange anonymized signals such as verified updates, fraud alerts, or bank account trust scores based on observed transactions. This cooperation strengthens data reliability and helps prevent financial or compliance risks.
The model also supports the controlled sharing of metadata, including standardized country codes, legal form abbreviations, and address components. By connecting organizations through shared validation, CDQ creates a network effect that continuously improves data quality across participants while preserving data privacy and governance boundaries. Data sharing is the foundation for nearly all CDQ capabilities, ensuring that validation, observability, and compliance insights are continuously enriched by collective intelligence.
These capabilities are provided by the CDQ Data Sharing Platform.
Metadata for data sharing
Metadata defines how data is structured, interpreted, and validated across systems. It is the foundation that enables organizations to exchange and compare information consistently, regardless of jurisdiction or language. For CDQ, metadata is essential to make data sharing possible at scale and across borders.
Because regulatory and business requirements change over time, metadata must evolve dynamically. CDQ maintains a continuously updated metadata repository that captures national and sector-specific data rules, such as address formats, identifier structures, and legal form codes. This ensures that shared and validated data remains semantically correct and compliant across all contexts. By sharing standardized metadata, CDQ enables customers to align their data models and validation rules, making collaboration efficient and legally sound.
Entity resolution
Entity resolution (also called identity resolution) determines whether different records represent the same real-world organization. In CDQ's data sharing context, this capability ensures that shared updates and validations refer to the correct entities, preventing duplication and confusion.
CDQ's matching engine applies a combination of deterministic identifiers and probabilistic similarity logic to detect duplicates, overlaps, and hidden relationships across datasets. This process allows customers to link their data mirror records to external references and shared records in the CDQ community. Reliable entity resolution is therefore a prerequisite for meaningful data sharing, enabling customers to recognize when another participant has already validated or corrected the same organization.
GDPR compliance
CDQ supports customers in maintaining GDPR compliance by identifying business partner records that may contain personal data. This is crucial for the data sharing approach, since shared insights must remain privacy-compliant. Only non-personal, business-related data can be exchanged among participants.
Our algorithms analyze patterns such as national registration numbers, legal forms that indicate sole proprietorships, and typical name structures to estimate the probability that a record refers to a natural person. A neural network trained on large sets of company and forename data enhances this detection logic. By ensuring that personal data is excluded from shared datasets, CDQ guarantees that collaboration remains secure, ethical, and fully compliant with European data protection laws.
CDQ data pool
The CDQ data pool connects to authoritative data sources such as company registers, tax authorities, and commercial databases. It serves as a bridge between public reference data and the shared knowledge within the CDQ community. Through the CDQ Lookup, users can search for and validate business partner information across these sources in a unified and transparent way.
This consolidated data access reduces manual research effort and increases trust in reference data. It forms the backbone for validation, enrichment, and compliance checks performed by other CDQ products. The data pool provides a continuously updated baseline that complements the shared community signals in CDQ's data sharing ecosystem.
These capabilities are provided by the CDQ Lookup.
Data observability
Business partner data is constantly changing due to events such as mergers, insolvencies, relocations, or ownership updates. Without continuous monitoring, data quickly becomes outdated and unreliable. For CDQ's data sharing approach, observability ensures that all participants benefit from early detection of such changes.
CDQ's observability model automates the detection of data changes and distributes actionable update insights across the network. Through CDQ Partner Guard, customers receive structured notifications when relevant updates occur in monitored sources. These insights can be filtered and integrated into internal systems to trigger review or correction workflows. As shared signals are validated and redistributed, all network members benefit from collective vigilance—turning data observability into a shared advantage.
These capabilities are provided by the CDQ Partner Guard.
Identifier validation
Accurate identifiers are essential for tax compliance, fraud prevention, and efficient transaction processing. Within CDQ's data sharing framework, validated identifiers are a key enabler of trusted collaboration. When one participant validates a tax or registration number, others can benefit from that verified information without redoing the same work.
CDQ Tax Guard provides automated validation for VAT numbers and other national tax or business identifiers worldwide. By applying country-specific rules and real-time data checks, it ensures that identifiers are syntactically correct, active, and associated with the right legal entities. This collective validation process strengthens overall data quality and ensures consistent compliance across the network.
These capabilities are provided by the CDQ Tax Guard.
Validation of EU VAT numbers
EU VAT number validation is critical for companies engaged in cross-border trade. CDQ's validation service integrates official EU databases and applies consistent logic to verify number structures, registration statuses, and country-specific requirements. When one participant validates an EU VAT number, that confirmation can feed into the shared knowledge base, helping other organizations verify the same partner faster and with higher confidence.
Validation of global tax and business identifiers
Outside the EU, CDQ validates national identifiers such as Brazil's CNPJ, Argentina's CUIT, or Saudi Arabia's VAT number. Each country defines unique numbering systems and validation rules. CDQ encodes these specifications in its logic, offering a unified global validation interface. This shared validation capability allows all CDQ participants to benefit from a global reference model that supports consistent, cross-border trust.
Sanction and watchlists
Screening business partners against sanction and watchlists is an essential compliance requirement. In CDQ's data sharing model, these checks not only protect individual organizations but also strengthen trust across the entire network.
CDQ's AML Guard provides access to lists from over 90 jurisdictions, including the United Nations, the European Union, OFAC, and HM Treasury. The solution automatically compares business partner data with these lists to detect potential matches. Shared insights about verified entities or cleared partners help the community avoid redundant screening and ensure that compliance information circulates efficiently within the network.
With transparent explanations and full auditability, AML Guard enables compliance teams to act confidently and efficiently. It reduces manual workload, prevents engagement with sanctioned entities, and protects both individual companies and the wider CDQ data sharing ecosystem from regulatory and reputational risk.
These capabilities are provided by the CDQ AML Guard.