our story – idea and reason of GCC
GCC Story – how credit agencies changed their business from 30 years ago to 2021!
The GCC story actually began 30 years ago. At that time, it was quite complicated to get an international business or credit report. Usually you first had to become member of one of the local credit information agencies and pay your annual membership fee. Secondly it was common practice that a prepayment for the anticipated annual consumption had to be paid in advance. Finally, the order could be placed, the research times were long and the costs high.
20 years ago, the online world was born. The credit agencies started to store their company reports on servers and offered them for instant download on online platforms.
Over the past 10 years the commercial credit reporting industry has completely changed their approach in conducting credit reports based on the traditional on-site manual investigations, to a variety of streamlined online checks created from electronically collected data, combined with statistical models and highly technical structured assessments.
However, during this period of change, many customers realized this approach cannot be the answer for all requirements. This is particularly so when it comes to international company credit information. Often there is a high level of uncertainty on the customer’s side as to whether an automatically generated credit report really provides accurate, reliable and complete information. …And customers are correct in challenging such sources.
Why?
In many countries (over half of the countries worldwide), where there is a gross absence of reliable and updated data on companies, the concept of machine based data gathering and credit assessments is seriously jeopardized.
In such scenarios, there is NO SUBSTITUTE for the traditional method of conducting on-the-ground investigations by experienced corporate information specialists.
We are not saying that interfaced collection of registration data, big data analysis, automatic scoring systems have no value in conducting international credit assessments of companies. In fact, for specific number of countries in which there exists a strong infrastructure for reliable and updated corporate data, GCC also incorporates selected sections of data in our own credit reports. However, we are convinced that the extra mile of a human driven investigation and assessment is essential for a credit report to become totally reliable instrument.
Therefore the business model GCC presents to customers for international credit reports is formulated on three (3) key components, namely:
- To retain some of the important values of traditional credit reporting procedures;
- Combine this, with other features of what today's Industry standards offers for advanced countries:
- To provide customers an ability to access GCC without having to commit to the normal industry barriers of pre-payment, or annual fees.
We believe GCC will fill an important and growing market niche which is not currently being serviced by the credit reporting industry.