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CHRINON LIMITED
DIRECTOR'S REPORT
FOR THE YEAR ENDED 30 NOVEMBER 2015
In addition, our business model made great strides, with a successful transition to the bulk of our income coming from commercial clients, rather than grants (sales increased by over 170%). Among the significant clients we added over this year were two contracts with the US government (including one with the Office Of Financial Research), multiple credit reference agencies, and an increasing number of traditional business information companies, such as Bureau van Dijk. Moving forward we expect grant income to be no more than 25% of our gross income, and are on target to achieve this.
We also made significant improvements to our API. This lead to an increasing number of users to the API, and this is being increasingly used in KYC/AML workflows.
While our grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation came to an end this year, we were successful in being granted two additional grants, both from the EU.
The first was a grant under the ODINE (Open Data In Europe) programme to open up government gazettes, with an associated OpenGazettes website, and we started work on this project in November 2015. Government Gazettes are a little-known but critical source of information about companies, particularly about critical events such as liquidation or merger. The project will create collect, standardise, aggregate gazettes from multiple countries, and connect them to the companies to which they relate.
The second grant is under the Horizon 2020 programme – we are part of the Chain React consortium that aims to make supplier networks transparent, understandable, and responsive, so that companies and their stakeholders can see, react to, and ultimately transform corporate network impacts.
This key fact of open data – that it has utility for both social impact and commercial impact – is increasingly recognised by governments around the world, and governments are gradually moving to make their company registers available as open data. Not only does this make it easier for OpenCorporates and others to consume the data, but it also raises the profile of open company data in general, in which OpenCorporates is seen as the world leader.
We still have a long way to go with OpenCorporates and the cause of open company data, but we are making good progress, and will agree a number of significant deals in the next financial year, as more and more organisations and companies see the value of our data.
This not only means we can be successful, sustainable and scale to include more and more data, it allows us to do this while making the information available to the public, to journalists, to NGOs, to academics, and indeed the general public.
It also means that the data is exposed to as many people as possible, thus improving the quality (using the “Many Eyes” principle). Finally, we consider this an important part of our public-interest mission, to make company information as widely and openly available as possible. For more information on this, and our other work, please read our 2015 Impact Report, available at http://blog.opencorporates.com/category/impact/
In preparing this report, the director has taken advantage of the small companies exemptions provided by section 415A of the Companies Act 2006.
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This report was approved by the board and signed on its behalf.
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Christopher Taggart
Director
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