Customer Services Group

Top 5 Questions About OneSource

Who are OneSource?

OneSource are a premium provider of business information. The OneSource database covers approximately 18 million global companies, 20 million executives and a wealth of industry intelligence such as Market Research reports and leading trade press publications.

OneSource aggregates content from best-of-breed data partners from across the world and adds significant value to it. We do this in a number of ways including having our own Data Overrides Team who are responsible for improving data quality of OneSource executives and corporate family structures to reflect the latest information from a number of credible sources, for example, company press releases and web sites. This helps to ensure that the information available from OneSource goes beyond what is filed locally by a company at a central repository, for example, Companies House in the United Kingdom.

OneSource also has its own propriety data. Examples of this include detailed business descriptions (adding approximately 2,500 per month) as well as in-depth audit fee data which is essential for our largest Professional Service Clients.

OneSource also add value to the content that is already available. For example, a "SWOT" and "Strategic Initiatives" report is derived from objective analyst reports covering quoted companies and consolidated into single reports which provide a critical understanding of a company's core strengths and weaknesses in the market and their current key business initiatives.

OneSource also add value by providing functionality which enables users to interrogate the content in different ways, and to make the content and reports easy to use.

OneSource continually strives to make all of our products intuitive as possible. Recent functionality enhancements have seen the introduction of exporting company reports into PDF and the ability to retrieve your "favourite" company profiles directly from the product home page.

Where does OneSource get its data from and how often is it updated?

OneSource licenses, integrates and adds value to data from a multitude of best of breed data sources which specialise in company reference and financial information, industry data, news and trade press, market research and specialist sources.

These best of breed data sources includes Reuters, who our are primary provider of global quoted company information, to specific country or region providers such as Experian (UK), Creditreform (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Graydon (Netherlands), Coface Services (France) and Asian Company Profiles Ltd. (Asia-Pacific).

The update schedule varies according to the source. For example, our news is updated every 30 minutes on an intra-day feed, whereas some information such as market research reports may only be updated once a year.

For a complete schedule by source please visit the Information Partners link under the Resources section available from all of our product home pages.

How do OneSource check the content for accuracy?

At OneSource quality assurance is not just a documented procedure. We regard the issue of quality very seriously. The OneSource database covers approximately 18 million companies on a world-wide basis. The information contained within our product is used by lawyers, financial analysts and accountants - 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We provide products that are highly reliable despite the dynamic nature of data.

We therefore constantly perform quality checks on the information so that all users can successfully access OneSource with the confidence that the data is of the highest quality and as accurate as possible. A two step quality process is followed for each content provider. When a new content provider is partnered with OneSource detailed quality analysis is carried out. Once the data reaches our data warehouse our objective is to ensure the highest quality levels possible. This is achieved using various comparison techniques, reviewing key data points and random analysis.

Roughly speaking we publish between 75 and 7,500 data points per company for the 18 million companies in our universe. Due to the high number of data points processed in any given week it is clear that we will not necessarily be able to identify all record-specific data errors. What we try to do instead is effectively identify any systematic issues that will result in widespread poor data quality.

The raw data we receive from our content providers is continuously being reviewed through a pre- and post-production analysis. The pre-production processes work towards capturing data anomalies in an effort to avoid introducing them into our products. These pre-production processes occur every time we receive a new feed of data from our content providers. In addition to our pre-process analysis we have an entire post-process analysis that is used by our clients and Content Quality Management Group.

We work with our content providers on a daily basis to communicate data issues, and to develop new methods of quality improvement and overall enhancements for seamless delivery of data.

What types of companies are included in the OneSource database?

The type of companies available in the OneSource global database depends on their ownership type or geography. All Stock Exchange quoted companies from across the world are included (approximately 40,000) as well as the full active universe in both the US/Canada (approximately 14 million) and UK (approximately 2.3 million).

UK companies will only appear in the OneSource database after they have submitted their first Annual Accounts to Companies House.

There are approximately 1 million of the top private companies available in the OneSource database outside Canada, US and the UK. The numbers of companies covered for selected countries are indicated below (please note that all numbers provided are approximate):

Europe

• France: 100,000
• Germany: 100,000
• Italy: 75,000
• Spain: 40,000
• Netherlands: 30,000
• Belgium: 25,000
• Sweden: 20,000
• Denmark: 15,000
• Norway: 15,000
• Finland: 15,000
• Ireland: 8,000
• Switzerland: 6,000
• Austria: 5,500

Australasia

• Australia: 18,000
• New Zealand: 4,000

Africa

• South Africa: 3,000
• Egypt: 1,500

Middle East

• Saudi Arabia: 2,500
• UAE: 2,500

North America

• Canada: 1.3m
• Mexico: 4,000

South America

• Brazil: 4,500
• Argentina: 2,000

To select the "top" companies in each country a selection methodology is applied. This selection criteria varies from country to country however it is largely based on turnover, number of executives, pre-tax profit, net worth and timeliness of the available data, that is, how up-to-date the financial information is.

What support and training does OneSource offer?

The OneSource Support Group is available from Monday to Friday between 9.00 a.m. and 1.00 a.m. GMT to assist our users with a wide range of issues ranging from access problems such as forgotten passwords, content/functionality questions and ideas for future product development. OneSource users are able to get in contact with the Support Group via a range of methods including:

Please note that support can only be offered to the named owner of an OneSource account.

The OneSource Customer Services website, MySupport, contains a wide range of help and reference material including user guides, frequently asked questions (FAQ's), and details of free teleconference/web-meeting training sessions designed to help our users use our products and services more effectively. There are two different training courses available:

• Introductory/Refresher
  Perfect for new users.
• What's new with OneSource
  For experienced users who want to understand recent content and functionality updates.

OneSource also offer tailor made training courses for customers. For more information on this please contact bac@onesource.com or your local Account Manager.