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FreePint Report: Product Review ofLexisNexis Company DossierSeptember 2014Product Review of LexisNexisCompany DossierIn-depth, independent review of the product,plus links to related resources“.the service contains information on around 80 million companiesand around 75 million business executives.”www.freepint.com Free Pint Limited 2014
ContentsIntroduction & Contact Details4Sources - Content and Coverage5Technology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help13Value - Competitors, Development & Pricing17FreePint Buyer’s Guide: Company Information20Other Products22About the Reviewer24 Back to Contents www.freepint.com-2- Free Pint Limited 2014
About this ReportReportsFreePint raises the value of information in the enterprise, by publishing articles, reports and resources that supportinformation sources, information technology and information value.A FreePint Subscription provides customers with full access to everything we publish. Customers can share individualarticles and reports with anyone at their organisations as part of the terms and conditions of their license. Somelicense levels also enable customers to place materials on their intranets.To learn more about FreePint, visit http://www.freepint.com/DisclaimerFreePint Report: Product Review of LexisNexis Company Dossier (ISBN 978-1-78123169-2) is a FreePint report published by Free Pint Limited.The opinions, advice, products and services offered herein are the sole responsibilityof the contributors. Whilst all reasonable care has been taken to ensure the accuracy ofthe publication, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.Except as covered by subscriber or purchaser licence agreement, this publicationMAY NOT be copied and/or distributed without the prior written agreement of thepublishers. Product names used in this report are for identification purposes only, andmay be trademarks of their respective owners. Free Pint Limited disclaims any and allrights in those marks. All rights reserved.This version of the report was published in September 2014 and was accurate asof that date.Contact InformationFree Pint Limited4-6 Station Approach, Ashford,Middlesex, TW15 2QN, United KingdomRegistered Office: Delaport Coach House, Lamer Lane, Wheathampstead, Herts, AL4 8RQRegistered Number: 3754481Telephone: 01784 605000International: 44 1784 605000Email: support@freepint.comWeb: http://www.freepint.com/ Back to Contents www.freepint.com-3- Free Pint Limited 2014
Introduction & Contact DetailsIntroduction: Company and ProductLexisNexis Company Dossier is part of a suite of company, executive and industryresearch services from well-known global information provider LexisNexis.The service contains information on around 80 million companies and around 75million business executives. It is sold as a standalone solution or as an add-on to thecompany’s main research services, Nexis and Lexis.Company Dossier is primarily used by researchers and analysts in information-intensiveorganisations across a wide range of sectors, including banks, insurance companiesand professional services firms; media clients are also heavy users.By Chris PorterView author biographyA sister product, LexisNexis Prospect Portfolio, serves sales and marketingprofessionals.Contact DetailsLexisNexis is a global company with headquarters in the US.LexisNexis230 Park Avenue, Suite 7New York, NY 10169USATel: the primary US sales telephone contact is (US) 1-888-285-3947 or 1-888-AT-LEXISEmail: Sara.Shaffer@lexisnexis.comWebsite: www.lexisnexis.comTwitter: @LexisNexisOther contact details worldwide can be accessed act-us.page.This chapter is alsopublished as an articlein your FreePintSubscription:LexisNexis Company Dossier(Introduction; Contact Details)Click to login now and read online » Back to Contents www.freepint.com-4- Free Pint Limited 2014
Sources - Content and CoverageLexisNexis Company Dossier combines proprietary information (especially legal,intellectual property and corporate hierarchy information) with content from a widerange of third-party publishers, including over 60 sources of company, industry andexecutive information.Additionally the service includes aggregated news from over 26,000 English-languagenews sources, including titles such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNNand USA Today.LexisNexis says in total there are around 80 million companies profiled on the service,of which around 32 million are in the US; quoted companies account for around 35,000of the total and the remainder are privately owned.Figures supplied by the vendor indicated that the countries with the largest volume ofcountry coverage were as galRussian ,750557,958548,025546,116Numbers, of course, are subject to change as additional information is added to theservice and as the corporate world evolves.As is generally the case with company research databases, the vendor combinesinformation from multiple sources into a single “Company Snapshot” display. Back to Contents www.freepint.com-5- Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014Figure 1: Company SnapshotCompany Snapshot: the Company Snapshot is headed with brief summaryinformation about the company, augmented for quoted companies with recent stockquotes in graphical form (sourced from SunGard).By scrolling down, the user can see further details such as a business description,yearly financials, top executives and data on the company’s auditor, legal counsel andboard of directors.Again as is classic in this kind of service, links to the left take the user to more detailedinformation such as brands, competitors, relevant news, further financials or relevantlegal or intellectual property coverage.The level of information available will vary depending on the location of the companyand of course whether or not it is publicly quoted.The Morningstar Institutional Database is the main source of quoted-companyfinancial data, though for some countries other providers are also used, such as ICC,Worldscope and Reuters Knowledge Direct.This chapter is alsopublished as an articlein your FreePintSubscription:LexisNexis Company Dossier(Sources - Content & Coverage)D&B and LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations are the primary providers for privatecompanies, though again additional detail may be incorporated from other sourcessuch as national chambers of commerce or other locally based information suppliers for instance Creditreform for Germany, FBR Asian Company Profiles for Asia-Pacific, orICC for the UK.The service seamlessly incorporates more specialised information from other providerswhere appropriate.Click to login now and read online » Back to Contents www.freepint.com-6- Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014For instance, useful quick summaries of recent merger and acquisition activity canbe found from Mergerstat and from the Experian Corpfin database.Analyst reports come from a range of providers including Zachs, ReportLinker andGMI Ratings, intermingled with summaries of key corporate events from S&P DailyNews; SWOT analysis of perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threatsmay be available from MarketLine (formerly Datamonitor); and for US companies, thereare links to regulatory filings from the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC).Legal information is sourced from within LexisNexis, and is focused on recent US,Canadian, UK, Commonwealth and Irish cases.Intellectual property information is also sourced from within LexisNexis, with a focuson recent US, European and Japanese patents, recent US and international trademarksand US copyright.Corporate hierarchy information is also proprietary to LexisNexis, coming from thecompany’s Corporate Affiliations service. The vendor says this currently covers onemillion companies and there is a project in hand which aims to expand coverage.While the Company Snapshot initially presents an instant view of a company bypulling together selected data elements from the various sources, it is also possible toclick through to the full original records from the various providers, thereby accessingfurther detail not displayed in the snapshot view.Frequency of Content UpdatesThe vendor provides a useful PDF document setting out how regularly Dossierinformation sources are updated - see the section “Content Update Frequency forLexisNexis Dossier” at his says, for instance, that Morningstar quoted company financials are updatedweekly, D&B private-company information updates are uploaded quarterly and othersources at varying frequencies - typically weekly, monthly or quarterly for directorytype information but as often as daily or intraday for more time-sensitive sources.Users should, of course, expect some elapsed time after a company publishes itsfinancial figures for the relevant information vendor to update its data records, thenpush the changes through to LexisNexis for uploading.FreePint saw many annual company financials figures which were as up to date ascould be expected, though isolated cases were seen where the annual data madeavailable by the provider did not yet reflect the latest numbers obtainable (see belowfor further examples).Source Content Detail - Company FinancialsFinancial information on quoted companies typically includes a good range of incomeand balance sheet items plus a quite extensive list of valuation, operation and earningsratios, with three years of history.The screenshot below gives a sample of as-reported annual income for a US-basedquoted company. Back to Contents www.freepint.com-7- Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014Figure 2: Quoted company financialsOn scrolling down, you may be presented with further information from other sources,depending on data availability - in the case of Microsoft a list of products offered,then information on major shareholders from Gale Group Company Briefs and theVickers Securities Report, and finally further earnings information from WorldscopeInternational Company Profiles.Currency: a handy drop-down at key points lets you switch the display between USdollars, Australian dollars, British pounds, Canadian dollars, Euros, Japanese yen or theoriginal reported currency, if it is different. Currency conversion rates are loaded to thesystem once a month and are applied across all years of financial data, so give a nearcurrent view rather than reflecting historical exchange rates.Harder to dig out is data on quoted-company performance by business segment orgeographic region; this does not appear to be systematically presented as a separateset of data. The same is true of quarterly company financials.Full company profiles: while the Company Snapshot initially presents an instant viewof a company, pulling together key data elements from multiple sources, it is alsopossible to click through to the full company profile records from the various providers.In digging through these more extensive records, you will sometimes light upon datasuch as business segment breakdown. For US companies, further levels of detail couldalso be found by following the left-hand links to the company’s SEC filings.For unquoted companies, LexisNexis says it typically provides one year of financialdata where available (though of course in some countries, such as the US and Australia,published financial information on privately held companies is extremely limited).However in some cases, local providers will give more history on private companies. Back to Contents www.freepint.com-8- Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014Example searches: during the review there were some good experiences of searchingon company financials, and some more mixed ones. Large- and mid-cap companiesfrom around the world were generally well-covered, but odd exceptions wereencountered.For instance, for NASDAQ-listed US-based insurance data company Verisk Analytics, acompany with annual revenue of almost USD1.6 billion, very limited financials werefound, whereas much smaller Swedish media intelligence vendor Cision, with latestannual revenue of around USD128 million, benefited from three years of detailedhistory.Searches on small- to mid-cap companies which had gone public over the last year ortwo in Japan, India and Australia yielded in one case, one year of revenue history; inthe second case, records of the company only as a private entity, including alternativerecords under a previous name which had been changed a couple of years earlier; andin the third case, no record at all.Conversely searches on small to medium-sized privately held subsidiary-branchcompanies in the Netherlands yielded up to four years of detailed financials,reflecting the vendor’s particular focus on that area; and searches on UK-based privatecompanies gave between one and three years of financials, generally with more datathe larger the company.A search on a German quoted company with around USD20 million of annual revenueproduced one year of very limited top-level financial data; another on a privateGerman company of similar size brought three years of detailed historical financials.Source Content Detail - News & AnalysisLexisNexis Company Dossier offers several options for searching news relating tocompanies.From the top left of a company snapshot view, a “Current News” link will bring back alist of headlines relating to the company in question.A little further down, the left-hand navigation has an “In The News” section whichallows the user to run more specific news-related searches.The news archive available within this context stretches back over two years andfocuses on English-language content only.Users can choose from: A pre-built list of “Major Publications” - major newspapers, press releases,magazines, transcripts or legal publications Or they can invoke a “Topic” search, selecting from business activity, corporatestructure, financial, legal or marketing and product options Or they can go to the “Region” section, choosing between the five options ofUnited States; Canada, Central America and Latin America; European; Asia and thePacific Rim; or Middle East and Africa.There is not an option to combine the different kinds of filters at this point or to addother more precise ones, though the user can drill down within the results screen byadding free-text terms to their search. Figure 3 shows “Business Activity” news. Back to Contents www.freepint.com-9- Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014Figure 3: “Business Activity” newsWhile the topic searching options guide users towards some of the major businesstopic areas, there is no direct equivalent to the “business trigger” or “business signal”event extraction features offered by some other providers. The vendor notes thattriggers are available in its solution aimed at sales and marketing professionals,Prospect Portfolio.The company news searching within the company snapshot environment leveragesthe LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology categorisation system whenever possible;the vendor tells FreePint that its news indexing system includes codes for severalhundred thousand companies.Where a match with a company code is not available, the system will automaticallyrun a free-text search on the company name, restricting it to the headline and leadparagraph of new stories in order to guard against irrelevant results.Those who wish to do more detailed news searching on companies than is possiblewithin this context have the option of going to the main search screen within thecore Nexis or Lexis products, where they may also be able to search news contentwith more advanced search options, such as the ability to search content in multiplelanguages, depending on their product subscription.They will be able to construct complex searches based on the full range of LexisNexis“SmartIndexing” terms for company, organisation, topic, industry, region and people,as well as further drilling down within their results set, using the most frequentlyoccurring index terms relating to the results.The indexing works across content in English, French and German. Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 10 - Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014Once the user is within the Dossier area, the top-level link to the main news searchingarea in Nexis or Lexis is no longer visible, so they need to take an extra step to navigateto the mainstream product.More detail on that functionality can be found in FreePint’s reviews of the fullLexisNexis product offerings, such as Product Review of Nexis.Source Content Detail - Executive and Industry ContentWhile the primary focus of this review is on company information, LexisNexis Dossieralso includes details on executives and industries.A window towards the right of the main company snapshot gives a list of topexecutives, with their name and job title and an icon to launch a search for the profileon LinkedIn.There are hyperlinks for each executive’s name; if the user has access to an add-onExecutive Dossier subscription, they will then be taken to a deeper executive profile,though otherwise they will receive an error message explaining that this area of theproduct is not available within their subscription plan.The hyperlinks to LinkedIn generally worked well, in almost all cases tested goingstraight to the correct profile. No links were found to other social networks, such asFacebook or Twitter.A “Download Table” link just below the list allows the user to export the list to aspreadsheet application; the exported table will in some cases also contain emailaddresses for the executives concerned.Additionally in the left-hand navigation of the company snapshot page, there areoptions to view a list of executive and professional contacts at the company. Thesecontacts may include telephone numbers (both switchboard and direct dial ifavailable) as well as email addresses. LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations, D&B ProfessionalContacts and NetProspex are the primary sources of executive contact information.As FreePint has remarked in reviews of other services of this nature, information onthe contacts associated with a company is a notoriously difficult thing to get right andto maintain in a timely manner. On random sampling, some good current coveragewas found, though some names listed had in fact moved on from the companiesconcerned.Those who subscribe to the Executive Dossier add-on also benefit from additionalscreening functionality, allowing them to create very targeted executive lists based forinstance on particular job profiles in a defined set of regions or even particular cities.The Prospect Portfolio variant of the service, aimed at sales and marketingprofessionals, also contains tools to help users to import leads and prospects into CRMapplications, as well as the business trigger alerts mentioned earlier.For those who subscribe to the Industry Dossier add-on; additional industryinformation and search capabilities are available, via an “Industry” tab in the top-levelnavigation bar. Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 11 - Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierSources - Content and Coverage September 2014To search for an industry, the user can enter a full or partial text string in a search box,insert a two- to four-digit SIC code or browse an SIC industry hierarchy - with the usuallimitations of SIC in terms of granularity and responsiveness to the changing industrialworld.Once they have selected their industry, they will see an industry overview descriptionand below it a list of top companies which the system sees as grouped within thatindustry by sales.Figure 4: Industry overviewBy scrolling down, the user will also see a set of ratio components for the list ofcompanies, and share price and trading volume charts.A “Recent News” link to the top left brings back a list of latest news headlines for theindustry, with the ability to search within the results using free text, as in a companysnapshot.A “Reports” button also provides access to industry profile reports.As in other products of this type, the industry snapshots available are for fairly highlevel industry classifications, so the level of usefulness will vary depending howspecific your industry interest is. The range of reports found was not wide, and severalwere unexpectedly country-specific rather than global in nature.FreePint’s View: SourcesüWide range of company-relatedinformation sourcesüExtensive collection of licensed newssourcesüüLarge number of companies coveredüEasy access to additional details fromunderlying company data sourcesEasy-to-use tools for switching currencyunitsûLimited/uneven depth of financial historyfor some quoted and unquoted companies. Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 12 - Free Pint Limited 2014
Technology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & HelpTechnologyThe LexisNexis Dossier suite is built using the company’s proprietary technology. Theproduct has been on the market for over a decade and has a common look and feelwith the core LexisNexis research products.As a general observation, the user interface does the job, though the overall look andfeel are not as fresh as in some other services on the market.Search and User InteractionsThe main starting point for a search in Company Dossier is the “Find a Company” tab.At its simplest, the user can just enter a free-text search string and hit the searchbutton; or they can very easily refine the search at this point, using other supportedoptions including ticker symbol, D&B DUNS number, geographic location and/or typeof company, picking from the options shown below.Figure 5: Finding a companyOn clicking the “Find” button, the searcher is presented with the three most likelymatches, plus an indication of the total number of possible matches and an option toview a list of all of them.Once the user clicks on a company name, the snapshot for that company is displayed.If the system contains only one match for the user’s search string, then the snapshotrecord for that company is displayed immediately. Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 13 - Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierTechnology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help September 2014Alternatively, the user can start with the “Create a Company List” tab - especially usefulfor the creation of sales or marketing prospect lists.This provides additional screening options, notably the ability to filter by companyrevenue or employee numbers, by industry (both SIC and NAICS systems aresupported), by postal or ZIP code, or by free text against elements such as businessdescription, executive name, brands and products or competitors among otheroptions.Figure 6: Creating a listThe wide range of filtering options allows you to build a very focused search, quicklyand easily.After this step, the user is prompted to specify which elements they would like toinclude in their results list - for instance, they may choose to see the web address, emailaddress and phone number but not the fax number, or the sales & revenue numbersand market capitalisation but not the EPS growth figure.While the company screening search can generate results sets containing up to100,000 records, downloads are limited to 3,000 records at a time. Multiple downloadscan be performed to obtain lists with more than 3,000 records.A search option which impressed FreePint is the “Compare Companies” feature.Here you can select up to five companies, by entering either a company name or stockexchange ticker code; when you click on a “Compare” button, you then see side-by Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 14 - Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierTechnology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help September 2014side data for each company relating to its income statement, assets and liabilities aswell as a ratio analysis. The system automatically calculates the percentage differencebetween the numbers for the first company you select and the ones you wish tocompare it with.Note that the data is presented in numeric form only, as is generally the case in theservice; an export-ready graphical display of the key data could be illuminating hereas at other points, though you can of course export the data into a spreadsheetprogram and then generate your own charts using the standard functionality of thatapplication.Outputs and AlertsLexisNexis Company Dossier has several useful output options.Links enabling you to print, download or email selected articles or reports areconveniently to hand at the top right of each screen, with various formatting optionsincluding the ability to include a cover page or add a brief note.When viewing multi-year, multi-column financials for a company, it is possible to selectand copy the data and paste it easily into a spreadsheet.There are also many points where links are provided to help you download tabularinformation into spreadsheet format - for instance in the sections for yearly financials,top executives and executive changes on the company snapshot page.The “Custom Report” tool, available low down in the left-hand navigation bar, has veryextensive options to help you specify exactly what items you would like to appear inyour company reports.Figure 7: The “Custom Report” tool Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 15 - Free Pint Limited 2014
LexisNexis Company DossierTechnology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help September 2014There are plentiful points within the product where you can save a search, after whichit becomes available on a “Saved Searches” sub-tab under the “My Research” tab atthe top of the screen; that area also has a handy history page, showing your last 100searches, so that you can easily re-run them or save them for future use.There are no alerting options within the Company Dossier area of the service; thevendor says that users typically take advantage of the alerting options available withinthe Nexis and Lexis product areas.Special Software FunctionalityOne special feature worth noting is the ability to integrate information directly into anintranet, portal, wiki, email, document or other internal application by pasting in anHTML link.LexisNexis says that any authorised Dossier user in your organisation will then see thecontent displayed in context, wherever you have published the content. The reportsupdate automatically, always providing the most recent information available.This feature is known as LexisNexis Dossier Publishing Manager, and is available as asubscription add-on.There is also a neat feature to allow the user to import lists of companies or executivesinto the service, using ticker symbols in a comma-separated values (CSV) format. This ishandy if you already have lists of companies you are tracking, and want a quick way ofrecreating those lists within Company Dossier without manually adding them one byoneAdministration and SupportUser preference information is accessed from a “Preferences” tab at the top of thepage. Here you can choose to show only headquarter locations in your search results,limit your results to a particular country or region or a particular company type, willdetermine whether to show current news in the company snapshot view.Each product screen has a “help” questionmark icon to the top right, giving contextsensitive help tips as well as links to an index of help topics and to a LexisNexis Dossiertutorial; a “Contact” link both here and at the bottom of each screen provides a UScustomer helpdesk telephone number (FreePint was trialling the product through a UScontact).While there are no other customer service options indicated within the product,LexisNexis is very much a global vendor and its region-specific sites indicate manyfurther support options such as local phone numbers, email addresses, online formsand web chat.FreePint’s View: TechnologyThis chapter is alsopublished as an articlein your FreePintSubscription:LexisNexis Company Dossier(Technology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, UserInterface & Help)üEasy filtering to create custom companylistsüGood range of export options, includingcustom report formatsüOption to integrate current data directlyinto intranets,CRM etcClick to login now and read online » Back to Contents www.freepint.com- 16 -ûMore focused drill-down into companyrelated news requires switching to theLexisNexis/Nexis.com research productûNo alerting options specific to changes incompany dataûInterface could benefit from moregraphical representations of data. Free Pint Limited 2014
Value - Competitors, Development & PricingPurchasing and ValueLexisNexis says that Company Dossier and associated products from the Dossierproduct suite can help users to: Prepare for meetings with prospects and clients Identify and pre-qualify potential customers based on specific criteria includingindustry, sales, geographic location, earnings and position titles Explore competitors Research industries and executives.It says Company Dossier is also a natural add-on for those who are already usingits main research databases, and who also want additional company informationcoverage.LexisNexis also says a significant benefit of Company Dossier is time-saving forresearchers, due to the way that it
LexisNexis Company Dossier is part of a suite of company, executive and industry research services from well-known global information provider LexisNexis. The service contains information on around 80 million companies and around 75 million business executives. It is sold as a standalone solution or as an add-on to the
