Context and issues

Since October 2016, the Law for a Digital Republic has shaken up the world of information by promoting, among other things, the opening and circulation of data. Open Data was born. Open Data and Big Data (varied and voluminous data) have thus disrupted the way of processing data and exercising economic intelligence.

With this new challenge comes new opportunities when one realizes this change: previously private data is now usable through open licenses. When free of copyright, this data can be aggregated with other data from multiple sources and ultimately transformed into verified, actionable information.

This has always been an intrinsic challenge of enterprise information: to make the information collected reliable and relevant to the customer.

Ellisphere, an organization adapted to the challenges of data

To cope with these new data sets, Ellisphere has put in place special structures - both physical and software - as well as new analysis and integration processes.

Indeed, issues arise in terms of volumes, but also of data quality, as well as the modalities and formats of availability. Open data is as collected at the source, not aggregated, with the highest level of granularity.

Before being integrated, the raw information recovered thus requires reprocessing before it can be used.

In the context of IMR Open Data, for example, the formats as well as the management of the information differ according to the registries. With Open Data, we take what is available: in the absence of exchanges to achieve the desired flow, analysis times are necessarily lengthened.

We have to take into account these constraints linked to suppliers, to which we must add the inevitable regulatory constraints for which a watch is necessary.

Today, Open Data expands access: BALO balance sheets, IMR open data (INPI), National Register of Trades ... And other possibilities according to opportunities: public contracts, subsidized associations, accounts of municipalities ...

The monitoring and collection process is permanent: depending on our clients' expectations and requests, we are constantly looking for new data to collect, which will be used in our offers (risk management, data marketing, compliance), and in specific client solutions (customised scores, etc.)

The data challenge is to cross-reference data and their uses. However, the massification of open data and multi-sourced data necessarily implies an increase in human actions of correction and validation of data.

The quality of the data at the center of our prerogatives

Ellisphere's Production Department is responsible for developing processes for the continuous supply, control and improvement of the entire corporate information production cycle, where human action is predominant.

Its essential missions are: to capture, collect multi-sourced information - whether portable or queriable - then control, analyze, correct and enhance this end-to-end enterprise information in an editorial quality intended for all Ellisphere solutions.

Various sources of information

The qualified information integrates a repository composed of all French companies, i.e. nearly 11 million active companies. Nearly 6 million inactive companies are also disseminated over a period of 10 years after their cessation.

At a first level, all the data and information from our various sources (INSEE, INPI, DILA, Commercial Court Registries, etc.) is subjected to loading controls through hundreds of consistency checks.

These checks are applied in a cross-referenced manner to data from the same source, or to the same data from different sources for the same SIREN.

For example, 1,500 algebraic and consistency checks are carried out on all the fields making up the balance sheets. These checks are regularly adapted, or others added, when the same anomaly occurs several times, or when formats or contents change, as does legislation. This is a continuous improvement process.

A permanent control

Ellisphere's teams note that each year, 10 to 15% of official data is subject to anomalies or errors. Input controls based on consistency, structure and matching rules for data already in the database generate logs for manual processing.

Ellisphere relies on human expertise to analyze, qualify and correct detected errors, and in particular on its dedicated teams of data managers to process balance sheets, legal notices, Bodacc and collective procedures.

The processing of information is complete, from the analysis of the data received to the daily collection within the framework of ad hoc campaigns on specific themes or targets.

Once reliable by our data managers, each company data is formatted, dated, archived and linked to its original sources for distribution. Each year, hundreds of thousands of corrections and interventions are made manually by Ellisphere's teams.

A structured organization to guarantee the reliability of the data

The Ellisphere database, fed by the aggregation of data from the above-mentioned public sources, and enriched by private sources (payment experiences, nominativities, media monitoring, etc.), also benefits from the contributions of the Financial Links and Surveys-Analyses teams operating within the Production Department.

Financial Links

One third of the entities in the database (10 million companies) have share capital and can potentially have capital links.

By definition, what we call a "financial link" is a capital link between a legal entity, provided with a share capital, and a shareholder, whether it is a legal entity, a natural person or a virtual entity.

Ellisphere deploys important resources to enrich a base of financial links with, on the one hand, documentary sources such as :

The press, the Balo for listed companies and their subsidiaries, the AMF, specialized websites such as Euronext or info financière.fr, institutional websites, annual reports, annual accounts (appendix 17 with the composition of the share capital and appendix 18 on subsidiaries and holdings)
The deeds and articles of association (minutes of incorporation, updated articles of association, transfers of shares), and moreover, all information from direct contacts with the companies.

The life cycle of a company with capital is thus finely followed, granting a date of freshness of the links, as close as possible to the reality of the legal events of the company, an essential element for our customers.

The richness of the Financial Links repository is the result of a revision process that takes into account the occurrence of legal events and the remediation of beneficial owners triggered for our clients (see our Compliance offer).

Human expertise, with a team of Financial Links managers, is key, especially since the documentary sources are not homogeneous. Manual monitoring operations on targets (repository of 900 large groups, client targets) also contribute to assigning an update date to financial links.

In 2021, more than 800,000 manual interventions on links (corrections, creations, history, updates, deletions, transfers), including nearly 400,000 manually created links, were carried out.

Survey and Analysis

Ellisphere's Surveys and Analysis team is responsible for conducting surveys on behalf of our clients.

Compared to a report, which is more factual and static based on available data, a survey is a high value-added service, mainly responding to a challenge in terms of credit risk (prospect - customer and/or supplier).

The survey provides analyses and comments on confidential data, and offers a dynamic and updated vision of the company through outgoing calls (CFO, bank, etc.). It is a personalized service, with a human analysis, an ad hoc collection of new elements as well as an adaptation of the restitution to the context of the company, to its market.

Research conducted during a survey provides information before it is published. Therefore, the quantitative information collected is immediately taken into account in the probability of failure score. In addition, qualitative elements in the comments can also complement or shed different light on the information.

Expertise at the heart of data quality

The business expertise of Ellisphere's Production Department employees remains more than ever essential for the exploitation of increasingly varied and voluminous data.

Indeed, this expertise plays a central role in the reliability of information at a time of multi-sourcing and the development of open data.

Mastering data quality is an integral part of Ellisphere's corporate culture. This strong added value is a real element of differentiation, a source of pride and a challenge for our experts: by guaranteeing the quality of the data delivered, Ellisphere promotes intelligent and oriented decision-making.