David Youngson CEO The Red Flag Group

 In response to increasing concern amongst companies to be liable for third party corruption, The Red Flag Group has launched Due Diligence as a Service. Through continuous monitoring of partners and suppliers, the new service will protect organisations against money laundering, labour violations and other illicit practices. The reputational cost of being involved in compliance violations can include significant business losses, share price collapses and even shareholder suits.

“Right now, companies don’t conduct enough due diligence when signing up a new business partner. This can have significant consequences if partners turn out to be involved in any type of corruption or illegal activities. Once in the system, the on-going monitoring of that business partner is fairly weak – if they do any monitoring at all,” said David Youngson, CEO of The Red Flag Group. “Companies that try to conduct some form of automated media monitoring become inundated with useless information with no one to analyse it. This could result in breach of compliance if organisations fail to address unidentified red flags. Getting the right due diligence is a case of make or break for businesses.”

The Red Flag Group’s new set of due diligence products, Due Diligence as a Service, extends the firm’s IntegraCheck | Integrity Due Diligence products by tracking and monitoring business partners, suppliers and channel partners against a large number of integrity and compliance risk areas. The service then sends a detailed and instructive IntegrAlert™ whenever an issue is identified that changes the integrity profile of the subject company. The IntegrAlert™ gives guidance, advice and direction on the identified issue and how to manage those risks and is individually tailored for every client, industry and risk profile of that company.

“Companies that take compliance seriously are looking for a way to ensure that their business partners are strong, ethical and act in compliance with their integrity expectations. As these relationships are on-going, clients have realised that they need to monitor and track these business partners well beyond signing them up. They need to check for any activity that might suggest that the business partner is engaged in high-risk compliance areas like corruption, bribery, money laundering and human-rights violations throughout the life of their relationship,” added Mr Youngson.

“The Red Flag Group’s Due Diligence as a Service solutions extend our well-known IntegraCheck due diligence solutions even further. In conjunction with our experts working in 180 countries, we have a unique ability to not only identify relevant information through our monitoring solutions but to analyse it and provide guidance and advice to a client on how to manage that risk. Our Due Diligence as a Service is a very tailored solution that looks at the client, the third party, their relationship, and the issues that the client needs to know based on their risk tolerance,” said Edo de Vries Robbé, Director of Due Diligence at The Red Flag Group.

About The Red Flag Group
The Red Flag Group builds, improves, manages, integrates and investigates compliance programmes across 180 countries for over 700 of the world’s largest companies. With offices and research centres in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, our professionals include former in-house counsel and compliance officers, supplemented by a diverse team of researchers and analysts, all tasked with building innovative and cost-effective solutions.