What is Entity Management?
Entity management simplifies data inefficiencies by consolidating fragmented entity records into a unified, pre-matched database. This process involves organizing, maintaining, and updating accurate information about legal entities, subsidiaries, and related corporate structures.
Entity management reduces delays and errors by eliminating manual matching across platforms, enabling faster, more accurate, and confident decision-making.
How Does Entity Management Work?
Entity management systems centralize ownership and operational data into a unified platform. These systems collect and structure data from multiple sources, resolve inconsistencies like duplicate or mismatched records and provide tools for due diligence, compliance monitoring, and business intelligence. Organizations can ensure data accuracy, save time, and make informed decisions by automating updates for ownership changes and regulatory requirements.
Current Practices in Entity Management
Many organizations rely on outdated and inefficient methods to address entity management challenges. These include:
- Manually identifying and verifying entities
- Using multiple systems to match entities with similar names
- Cross-referencing companies with sanction lists and handling duplications manually
- Operating with minimal automation, leading to inefficiencies
- Managing compliance, safety, and credit risk in separate silos
- Lacking tools to derive actionable insights from entity data
Challenges in Entity Management
The maritime industry’s complexity introduces significant challenges for effective entity management:
Ownership data is often unstructured and fragmented, making integration and consistency difficult. Organizations lack a unique company ID for tracking, and similar or identical company names can cause confusion. Variations in entity names – such as “Windward Ltd” vs. “Windward UK” – further complicate matters. Complex ownership structures with multiple subsidiaries, combined with frequent updates in ownership data and sanctions lists, exacerbate duplication, errors, and inefficiencies.
Entity Management Tailored to Your Workflows
- Vessel due diligence: visibility into vessel ownership ensures an accurate assessment of potential compliance and risk factors before engaging with a vessel, helping to avoid legal, financial, or reputational pitfalls
- Counterparty due diligence: understanding the true ownership behind counterparties allows you to evaluate credit risk, regulatory exposure, and operational structure, so that you can make informed decisions when onboarding new vendors or renewing contracts
- Business intelligence: having access to detailed ownership data empowers organizations to strategically plan business approaches, and to target the right opportunities at the right time, while mitigating hidden risks that could impact long-term goals
How Windward Can Help
By centralizing and structuring ownership information, Windward’s Maritime AI™ solution enables organizations to:
- Resolve entity resolution issues: by matching between multiple company identifiers
- Maintain data accuracy: a human-in-the-loop approach ensures timely and accurate updates
- Access high-quality data: proprietary ownership data covers 92% of the relevant market and is updated daily
- Integrate seamlessly: retrieve comprehensive data through a single API call, including:
- Vessel information: properties, ownership, risk, sanctions, PSC, and activity timeline
- Company information: details, fleet, risk, sanctions, fleet risk, and ultimate beneficial owner (UBO)
- Unify risk management: integrate compliance, safety, and credit risk into one cohesive platform
With Windward, organizations can save time, reduce errors, and streamline investigative and decision-making processes, ensuring they stay ahead in the maritime industry.
