When a company goes on sale, potential buyers should be shown an in-depth report on the company's financial status, called vendor due diligence. Vendor due diligence means gaining trust that a vendor is stable, and its corporate structure is solid.
What Is Vendor Due Diligence?
Vendor Due Diligence (VDD) takes place in business relations between companies. If a company's shares go on sale, potential buyers need to be thoroughly researched and reported, in which case vendor due diligence comes into play. VDD reports, especially used by financial institutions, use potential vendors to evaluate or to ensure that they are still ethical and strong. VDD is necessary both to reduce threats to business operations and to reduce compliance risk and reputation risk. That's why VDD is important for AML/CTF. Vendor Due Diligence Report is generally conducted by a third party and presented to potential investors. Potential buyers examine the report to determine the financial solvency and expectations of the company stock sold. This report helps address the seller's concerns before continuing with the purchase. It is advantageous to perform the vendor due diligence just before the sales process begins, so that if any significant financial problems are found, or any findings that may cause problems in the sales can be corrected before the sale is made.
What is Vendor Due Diligence Objective?
Businesses can provide valuable information to the seller during the sales process by making a vendor due diligence. For example, to support the purchase at a better price, the seller can provide very good benefits by using VDD, which is why VDD is important and injured. You can find some targets of vendor due diligence below:
- To learn the problems of companies in detail.
- Companies to sell successfully at the best price
- Identifying critical business drivers for companies' future performance
- Increasing the purchase price
- The buyer sees potential risks in organizations.
- Fine-tune and improve your business plan
- Improving the quality of offers received for sellers
What Is The Vendor Due Diligence process?
Firstly, The vendor should contact the third party to provide the necessary maintenance and verify that the procedures have been implemented before the target company is sold. The company's relationship with the third party is valuable because talking directly to the third party is an important step in verifying the risk of money laundering.
Secondly, Vendor Due Diligence Report is prepared as a result of evaluations and sent to the parties for review. After this report, sellers allow potential buyers of the companies they sell to make their own due diligence.
Thirdly, Depending on the type of offers of potential buyers for sellers, buyers can negotiate with the sellers they offer.
Finally, If the sale is completed, legally, the buyer gets the VDDR mentioned earlier.
Vendor Due Diligence Checklist
Basic Company Information
Gathering basic company information ensures that companies are legitimate and licensed. Basic company information basically covers them; business license, whether it is in a high-risk country, company structure, location evidence such as main contract, photo, references from reliable sources.
Politica and Reputational Risk
Corruption or political weaknesses can potentially be dange rous. Some of the political and reputational risks are negative news reports, risk-related internal policies, global sanctions lists, PEP lists, reports of some agencies, and companies' and individuals' case history.
Operational Risk
The vendor should evaluate whether it is exposed to operational risks that may adversely affect its company.
Some operational risks are business continuity plan, disaster preparedness plan, code of conduct, and employees' litigation indicators.
Financial Risk
Potential buyers want to check whether the seller is financially solvent, so they need some financial information such as information sources such as compensation structure, loans, balance sheets, tax documents, assets.
Vendor Due Diligence on AML
While Vendor Due Diligence reporting is being made, vendors need to scan political links, scan sector-specific risks, scan lists, and adverse media scanning of any sanction lists applied to the government to sell avoid exposure to money laundering risks while selling their companies. When a potential buyer decides to buy a company, he has to pay attention to these. As a result, no one wants to buy a money laundered company, and Vendor Due Diligence Report can be very useful in clarifying this problem. Moreover, Banks may be fined if Vendor Stop Dilinge does not, or if the seller misbehaves, or so unwanted cases may be brought against them.
Vendor Due Diligence Best Practices
While creating Vendor Due Diligence Reports, some activities must have been carried out so that vendors and potential buyers can be maximally injured from this report. Some of these factors are; First of all, the enterprises perform a detailed data collection, and then they monitor the transactions of the companies such as criminal activities, and finally, the information found during the data collection and the process is verified.
Furthermore, Customer Due Diligence must be carried out during the preparation of the Vendor Due Diligence Report. With such vendor due diligence practices, financial institutions carry out money laundering processes, the reputation of a company that complies with AML procedures is protected; it is not subject to fines or enforcement. Finally, Financial institutions should use review practices, surveys, and record-keeping practices for all current vendors and brokers to reduce the risk of seeming harmless vendors.
