Securing Critical Infrastructure: Telecom Leader Vets 800 Suppliers for State-Ownership Risk
Critical Risk Domains
Trade Compliance
Foreign Influence
Sayari empowered a high-growth telecommunications leader to secure its multi-billion dollar supply chain by unmasking non-obvious ownership structures and Chinese state-linked vulnerabilities. By automating risk orchestration, this customer achieved comprehensive Tier-N visibility, identifying previously undetected threats across its global vendor network.
Success at a Glance:
800 Core Suppliers Vetted:
Gained immediate, deep-tier visibility into the entire critical infrastructure vendor base, including high‑risk upstream entities.
Zero-Gap Compliance:
Fulfilled rigorous PADFA requirements and U.S. government mandates for Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence (FOCI) screening and mitigation.
Automated Risk Discovery:
Replaced manual spreadsheet tracking with real-time, defensible data on complex, multi-jurisdictional corporate structures.
The Challenge: Opaque Adversarial Influence in a Critical Supply Chain
As a provider of U.S. critical infrastructure, the company faced mounting pressure to secure its supply chain against adversarial states using shell companies and minority stakes to infiltrate sensitive networks. Legacy data providers could not reliably illuminate complex Chinese ownership or upstream exposure, forcing teams to manage advanced security and compliance risk with manual spreadsheets and fragmented data.
The introduction of the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act (PADFA) transformed the need to identify links between vendors and foreign adversaries from a strategic preference into a compulsory legal obligation. The company needed a way to prove both the presence and absence of foreign control across hundreds of high‑value suppliers.
The Solution: Graph-Based Intelligence for Supply Chain Transparency
By adopting Sayari’s risk intelligence platform and data, this customer transitioned from reactive monitoring to proactive risk orchestration. Sayari’s ownership data combines massive scale, jurisdictional and offshore depth, official records with full provenance, and tight integration with trade and vessel data, This allowed the team to see real‑world control and influence across corporate networks—not just point‑in‑time corporate snapshots.
Key Transformation Pillars:
Precision Risk Visibility: Delivered deep insights into non-obvious risks, specifically targeting state-sponsored influence and national security threats.
Cross-Jurisdictional Mapping: Enabled the team to visualize complex networks and definitively answer, “Who is supplying our suppliers, and who ultimately controls them?”
Defensible Evidence: Provided verifiable, external data that replaced unreliable internal questionnaires with “trusted-by-regulator” intelligence.
“The ability to identify foreign ownership and links within a few clicks has transformed how we tackle PADFA as an organization”
Impact: Hardened Resilience and Regulatory Certainty
Mitigated Critical Infrastructure Threats: Successfully vetted approximately 800 vendors to meet federal expectations for identifying high-risk state ownership typologies.
Exposed Sub-Tier Vulnerabilities: Eliminated “blind spots” by verifying the true identities and control structures of sub-tier entities, ensuring a supply chain free of sanctioned or bad actors.
Eliminated Intelligence Gaps: Overcame the limitations of incumbent providers by surfacing complex Chinese corporate structures that were previously invisible.
Achieved PADFA Compliance: Empowered legal and operations teams to identify foreign adversary links to U.S. citizen data, ensuring regulatory alignment.
