Witad Awards 2020: Reference Data Professional of the Year—Louise Green, Bureau van Dijk (A Moody's Analytics Company)

When you’ve spent 30 years at the same company, you must be doing something right. That’s how long Louise Green has spent at company information provider Bureau van Dijk, steering its marketing activities, first for the UK market, and now as managing director, with a global remit for its products.

Green joined the vendor as one of its first UK employees. Then, BvD was selling data on CD-ROMs, which she says was “revolutionary” at the time. Now, as part of Moody’s Analytics, the vendor’s products cover more than 366 million companies (up from 60 million 10 years ago) and 325 million company executives.

Over that 30 year period, Green points to two trends that have contributed to the company’s growth: first, technical advances that allow for far greater export and integration of data, and the creation of identifiers that allow users to create company-level views; and second, the globalization of data. Whereas company data used to be domestic by market, the vendor created regional and global datasets to reflect a company’s global presence via its supply chain, partners, and customers.

Before BvD, Green worked for a financial analyst, gathering data from official sources on construction companies. “So when I interviewed at BvD, I understood the product because it was what I would have wanted,” she says. Her first three years at the vendor were in sales, where she came to understand the importance of working closely with clients—something she says its salespeople still excel at, actively providing feedback to drive product development. “The culture here is that we get excited about the things clients can do with our data,” she adds.

During the 2017 purchase of BvD by Moody’s Analytics, Green was “privileged” to be part of the team charged with representing BvD in the acquisition and integration and understanding what Moody’s brought to the table. For Green personally, this translated to a bigger role, and leading last year’s launch of its Compliance Catalyst 2 product, which helps firms strengthen their third-party due diligence and risk assessments, reflecting the evolving market’s need for a more scalable compliance platform.

Now, Green is excited about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to help evolve BvD’s platforms further. “There is always appetite for more data, and higher-quality data. We’re constantly striving to reduce false positive results, and AI is going to make a big difference around speeding up the interpretation of data. We’re about helping people make better decisions and work more efficiently.”

—MB