Orbis updates: what's new in July?

Following my last product update in April, enhancements to the new Orbis interface continue apace.

Our flagship database recently passed the 220 million-company mark, with new material from a variety of jurisdictions around the world, such as China, South Africa and the Philippines, to name just three.

We're proud of the breadth and depth of our coverage. But we're also excited to announce a number of new features and developments that went live on the new interface last week, highlights of which I summarise here.

Financial transparency

We've added a click-through option to our financials. This means that you can click a financial figure to see the calculations behind it.

Customising Orbis

We've added more options to customise your results by creating your own chapters for your books. You can also create your own variables to use in your books or chapters and in your searches – in the old interface these were called user-defined variables.

Batch search

You can already paste a list of companies' names into the name search, for fast multiple company searching. Now we've also added full technical batch searching in the tools zone.

Financial strength

We've added a new score into our financial strength module. The Compass Score from G2 assesses retailers and merchants for fraud and potential risk.

We've also enhanced how we present our financial strength information.

Improved navigation of books (reports)

You told us that you liked lots of elements of the new books, but the navigation could be a bit confusing. We've improved the navigation pane on the right so you can move from chapter to chapter more easily – and you can see the contents of your current book at a glance.

Viewing information on people

We've improved the presentation of the information on people, including directors and advisors. Directors are listed by department, and you can now filter by roles, seniority and source of the information.

Moody's research reports now available

The Industry research chapter of the report now includes Moody's research as an option, which gives you access to 9,000 company and 7,500 industry reports from Moody's Analytics, on a pay-per-view basis using BvD credits. The reports cover both listed and unlisted banks and companies. In addition, in September we'll add all rating-related announcements published by Moody's.

Tax Explorer

A new option in the Ownership Explorer helps you identify entities in low-tax jurisdictions – this "Tax Explorer" is offered at an additional cost.

All searches now available

The new version of Orbis includes all the searches that are on the old one. Notable additions include searches on our ownership structures. Also, you can now perform free text searches on your notes.

Learning

The Orbis Learning Zone is being developed, and training videos are being added. Do let us know if there are particular training videos that you would find useful.

Orbis keeps evolving...

As ever, we're creating, incorporating and rolling out features and functionality on the new Orbis interface all the time. Each enhancement is intended to help make sure that you can take full advantage of our rich, structured data in order to carry out your research processes as efficiently and effectively as possible.

If you already subscribe, do please get in touch with your account manager if you'd like more information on any of these developments. If you're not yet a user, you can evaluate Orbis with a free trial.