Every business likes to portray itself as strong and healthy – but beneath the surface some of your most important business partners may not be so robust.
To engage with customers and suppliers with a high degree of confidence, your business needs to know just how solvent each of those trading partners is – and to be aware when that changes.
Here are four strategies you can adopt to confidently know that your suppliers are in a position to fulfil your orders and your customers can pay their invoices on time:
Statutory financial reports are rarely enough to make informed decisions. They’re invariably retrospective and always out of date, giving you at best a quarterly snapshot and, in some cases, only an annual perspective. They certainly don’t encompass all the risk factors that might suggest when a business partner is struggling. A truer picture of financial health is often only visible when information is gathered and analysed from a much wider set of financial and industry sources.
That’s where Allianz Trade’s Grade Check service plays a vital role. Grade Check provides you with accurate, up-to-date insight on the creditworthiness of all your business partners, drawing on an unparalleled database that monitors the payment track records of 83+ million companies worldwide. And because it draws on the same information pool that our insurance experts use to determine the insurance cover for client policies around the globe, you can count on its accuracy and reliability. Just as we do.
Whether customers or suppliers, your business partners operate in industrial sectors or country locations where you may have little knowledge. From time to time, those areas can experience a major disruption that can affect a partner’s supply chain, its ability to pay, its overall solvency, its debt exposure, and more. That might involve events such as the imposition of trade barriers or embargoes, the shortage of raw materials, extended industrial action, or regional conflict – causing disruption that may not be apparent to you until it’s too late.
As the world leader in trade credit insurance, protecting more than £800m in business transactions annually, Allianz Trade maintains a perspective on both global economics and local market conditions through a direct presence in over 50 countries and risk monitoring covering more than 160 countries. In today’s fast-changing international trading environment, you need early warning signs on how events might impact your partners’ financial stability. With Grade Check, we distil those information flows and present it to you as an easily comprehensible grade on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating the likelihood of a partner defaulting in the coming 12 months.
There are few better ways to know the state of your business partners than hearing it from your peers. Our base of 70,000+ trade credit insurance clients provides us with a window into the health of business everywhere – insight they share with us and we share with you. When our clients encounter a slow or reluctant payer, or a company struggling to deliver on its commercial commitments, we hear about it quickly.
With regular visits to our clients, we get direct insight into payment patterns across their trading networks. And that information is fed into our information pool to create an intelligence service that not only rates solvency but reacts when a company’s fortunes change – effectively acting as your early warning system against potential defaults.
Whether you have just a handful of key customers and suppliers or many thousands, stepping outside of your day-to-day activities to review each one’s credit status before making a business decision is simply not practical, let alone desirable. Ideally, the capacity to view and track the creditworthiness of your business partners should be a feature of your core business processes.
With an API that links directly into your credit management system, Allianz Trade Grade Check can become a seamless part of your decision-making processes, allowing you to make fast, confident decisions on the partners you want to be part of your business success. Alternatively, you can integrate Grade Check into your partner management processes with instant and easy access to credit grading via the Allianz Trade Online Portal.
Allianz Trade Grade Check: enabling trading networks of reliable suppliers and trustworthy customers.
To find out more, visit Allianz Trade’s Grade Check page
Allianz Trade is the global leader in trade credit insurance and credit management, offering tailored solutions to mitigate the risks associated with bad debt, thereby ensuring the financial stability of businesses. Our products and services help companies with risk management, cash flow management, accounts receivables protection, Surety bonds, Business Fraud Insurance, debt collection processes and e-commerce credit insurance ensuring the financial resilience for our client’s businesses. Our expertise in risk mitigation and finance positions us as trusted advisors, enabling businesses aspiring for global success to expand into international markets with confidence.
Our business is built on supporting relationships between people and organisations, relationships that extend across frontiers of all kinds - geographical, financial, industrial, and more. We’re constantly aware that our work has an impact on the communities we serve and that we have a duty to help and support others. At Allianz Trade, we’re strongly committed to fairness for all without discrimination, among our own people and in our many relationships with those outside our business.
