Borrowers, investors, vendors, customers and employees all represent a degree of risk to your organization. Knowing who you are doing business with has never been more important. The potential risk of doing business with someone who you do not know goes well beyond simple economic loss. Legal liability; including civil law suits, law enforcement and regulatory action, as well as a loss of shareholder value can result from doing business with the wrong people.

Your organization can mitigate these risks through investigative due diligence. For years, legal practitioners, mergers and acquisition advisors and commercial bankers have utilized financial and legal due diligence to reduce risk. These categories of due diligence, while extremely important, seldom provide information about a person’s character, integrity or past conduct. Investigative due diligence is the application of exploratory techniques developed by law enforcement agencies to minimize relationship risk by analyzing publicly available information and discovering any red flags that can serve as a predictor of future derogatory behavior.

Daylight regularly performs services ranging from C-level background investigations to searches surrounding the principals and entities involved in complex sales, mergers or acquisitions. We perform these services for government agencies, commercial and investment banks, private equity firms, broker-dealers, venture partners, initial public offering candidates, hedge funds and a variety of other business entities. Daylight has extensive investigative tools consisting of online access to a wide variety of commercial research databases, experienced public record researchers, and investigative professionals located worldwide.

Our clients understand that the value of using Daylight is in our ability to scour the public record as well as our global network of information sources, targeting potential red flags and presenting them in the context of our client’s objectives. Accordingly, our approach is not check-list driven, nor is it reliant on any one resource. It is tailored to the client’s objectives and the industries, geographies and regulatory environment in which they operate.

Our basic investigative framework considers the following types of information:

• Corporate records and directorships, including status of incorporation, related entities, directors and officers, financial background
• Criminal history queries on the entity and its principals
• Civil litigation history
• Judgments, liens and bankruptcies
• Professional licensing and disciplinary records
• U.S. and foreign government sanctions lists including the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Government Services Administration’s Excluded Parties List, The Bank of England Financial Sanctions Unit and the EU’s Consolidated list