Duedil - Making Company Data More Transparent
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Abstract

Penny Crossland reviews internet start-up Duedil - short for due diligence - and finds it a welcome addition to the numerous web-based providers of company data. Aggregating all UK and Irish company documents from the official registers, around 100 million at the last count, Duedil combines these with information from regulatory registers and presents the data via a visually attractive dashboard, with interactive features.

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Internet start-up Duedil - short for due diligence - is a welcome addition to the numerous web-based providers of company data. Aggregating all UK and Irish company documents from the official registers, around 100 million at the last count, Duedil combines these with information from regulatory registers and presents the data via a visually attractive dashboard, with interactive features. The open source data is also linked to social media to make it as transparent as possible.

In addition to analysing 30 million data points from UK and Irish company accounts, Duedil provides its 250,000 active users with company profiles from Wikipedia and Crunchbase, where available. It may also find connections in the companies you are researching via your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter accounts. Users are able to post opinions on firms, which can be helpful to researchers trying to evaluate them.

The due diligence element of the service is most evident in the company health feature, which acts as a warning against actual or potential problems associated with firms. This is still in the development phase, but will eventually include data from a variety of regulatory and legislative bodies.

Searching the database is easy. A basic search allows you to look for companies by name or registration number or to find directors. There is also an advanced search option, which makes Duedil a useful competitive analysis tool. This option allows you to filter company searches by financial metrics, industry or location and director searches by their status or function. All this information is free; users are charged for company filings and credit reports and are encouraged to take out subscriptions to make bulk buying more cost effective.

The service has a “work in progress” feel to it. It is, for example, not clear how to capture large amounts of data in an advanced search and the support function did not work well when I tried it, but Duedil is definitely a company database worth watching. The firm has received more than $7 million in funding in the last seven months, which it has used to develop the site and is promising to put towards an expansion into mainland Europe.

It will be quite a feat to replicate the current database for other European countries, given disclosure requirements outside the UK and Ireland, however any tool making company filings more transparent via a dashboard as user-friendly and attractive as Duedil's will be welcome.

www.duedil.com

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