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Sayari Buyer’s Guide

What is “commercial risk intelligence,” and why do I need it?

Commercial risk intelligence is the aggregation, resolution, and processing of global public records, including corporate structure, ownership data, trade activity, and risk lists, to surface hard-to-find connections between entities.

This capability has become essential in understanding ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) and creating visibility into how different entities are related, whether for supply chain risk management, law enforcement and regulatory investigations, or national intelligence. But the success of these technologies depends on a few factors, which could be the difference between your analysts and investigators getting to the information they need quickly, versus spending significant time across multiple sources, systems, and websites.

The market today has shifted. The lack of data visibility often leaves organizations vulnerable to unseen compliance risks. Additionally, critical data is often fragmented across disparate sources, and risk management has become siloed between teams, including finance, procurement, and compliance.

Modern commercial risk intelligence should deliver evidence-backed answers as a single source of truth so organizations can immediately and efficiently take action on those insights. By unifying proprietary data with AI-driven automation, the right platform collapses the research cycle from weeks to seconds, enabling organizations to be compliant with confidence and drive defensible, audit-ready outcomes.

When selecting a platform, look for these three core pillars of value:

1.  Unified, Robust, Extensible Data

Aim for a 360-Degree View of Risk or Investigative Targets

Data is the foundation of commercial risk intelligence. Yet, critical data is often fragmented and siloed across disparate sources, making it impossible to establish a single source of truth. This leaves organizations exposed to unseen third-party, supplier, and supply chain risks. Without complete, comprehensive data, your analysts and investigators will still need to cobble together different pieces of information and spend significant time and effort validating their findings.

What to look for:

  • Breadth, Depth, and Reach: A robust platform should offer an AI Data Fabric that allows you to harness the world’s most comprehensive corporate and trade data. Look for coverage like Sayari’s, which includes over 10 billion records from 250+ jurisdictions, to ensure you have a multi-dimensional view of risk against your targets.
  • Comprehensive Risk Domains: It is important to consider how comprehensive the data is beyond just one type. The right solution provides comprehensive trade and compliance risk domains to surface hard-to-find connections between corporate entities and their shareholders, subsidiaries, and other related parties.
  • Fewer Data Vendors: By consolidating disparate data sources into a single platform, you can achieve a more comprehensive view of risk and compliance posture. This reduces friction and improves ROI by eliminating the need to manage multiple overlapping data vendors.

2. Efficiency of Risk and Analysis

Accelerate the Analysis Lifecycle and Eliminate Investigative Friction

Slow, manual processes result in low-quality, delayed decisions that drain time and budgets. Complex, multi-step processes are slow, resource-intensive, and prone to error, creating a painful bottleneck between intelligence discovery and decisive action. This inefficiency increases vulnerability to threats and prevents the significant savings and brand protection needed.

What to look for:

  • Illumination and Automation: Look for a platform that allows you to easily navigate complex trade networks or n-tier supplier relationships based on rich entity resolution and risk scoring. Utilizing graph analytics technology that is designed for visual analysis eliminates the need to create networks ad hoc, helping teams handle increasingly complex relationship analysis quickly.
  • Fully Automated Workflows: Optimize your team’s capacity by replacing manual research with fully automated workflows for risk insights. A comprehensive solution should automate critical processes — including third-party questionnaires, screening, and continuous monitoring — to reduce operational friction and accelerate decision-making.
  • Rapid Time-to-Value: It is critical to understand how long it will take to reap the rewards of your investment. Solutions like Sayari that are purpose-built for analysts enable first-time users to find their target of interest within their first five minutes. Additionally, look for enterprise-grade integration that can connect commercial risk intelligence data as a feed into your existing solutions through an API, collapsing the analysis lifecycle.

3. Trustworthy Outcomes

Count on Auditable and Transparent Results

Screening processes are often opaque and lack transparency, failing to provide the auditable, traceable, and explainable decisions required by regulators. Decisions based on intelligence frequently lack verifiable, transparent, and legally defensible backing. Without an auditable foundation, organizations risk accountability, regulatory penalties, and severe reputational damage when facing scrutiny.

What to look for:

  • Full Audit Trail from Data to Decision: It is essential that data is reliable and clearly sourced, known as data provenance. Look for a solution that provides full data provenance from source to output, creating a clear line between the end-user analyst and the original source. This ensures auditable outcomes suitable for the boardroom or the courtroom.
  • Full Explainability with Zero Hallucinations: As reliance on advanced analytics grows, accuracy remains paramount. Ensure your provider offers full explainability with zero hallucinations of results. Decisions must be verifiable and transparent to provide the legally defensible backing required to mitigate regulatory risk.
  • Purpose-Built Transparency: An effective commercial risk intelligence platform provides relevant analysis and investigation capabilities natively, rather than relying on generic toolsets. This ensures that screening processes provide the transparent, traceable decisions required to avoid the constant threat of non-compliance.

Ready to take the next step?

While this list is not exhaustive, it provides the top factors that can mean the difference between a commercial risk intelligence platform that delivers on your expectations or a lengthy project that leaves you looking for other options.

As you put together your short-list of commercial risk intelligence providers, consider how Sayari addresses these considerations:

  • Data breadth, depth, and provenance: Sayari has the most comprehensive commercial risk data covering more than 10 billion records, 846 million companies, 801 million key individuals, and 250 global jurisdictions. This includes comprehensive trade and compliance risk domains to provide a multi-dimensional view of risk against targets.
  • Process Speed & Efficiency: Sayari delivers illumination and automation, allowing teams to easily navigate complex trade networks or n-tier supplier relationships based on rich entity resolution and risk scoring. With fully automated workflows for risk insights, including third-party questionnaires, screening, and continuous monitoring, Sayari delivers rapid time-to-value.
  • Time to value: As a SaaS platform, Sayari can be deployed in as little as a few minutes and includes everything you need to get started. On average, first-time users find their target of interest within 5 minutes of using Sayari.
  • Trustworthy Outcomes: Sayari provides a full audit trail from data to decision. The AI-enabled platform ensures full explainability with zero hallucinations and full data provenance from source to output, providing auditable outcomes suitable for the boardroom or the courtroom.

About Sayari

Sayari provides global corporate transparency and supply chain risk identification for government and industry. Its commercial risk intelligence software harvests comprehensive corporate and trade data from more than 250 jurisdictions worldwide and surfaces previously hidden risk insights in an intuitive network analysis platform.

Since its founding in 2015, Sayari has earned the trust of top financial institutions, Fortune 100 corporations, and government agencies, securing a $40M Series C in 2021. Sayari is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and its solutions are used by more than 3,000 frontline analysts in 35 countries.

To learn how Sayari powers safer global commerce, please visit sayari.com.

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