Case study from February 2019
Mercateo is Europe's leading procurement platform, where hundreds of suppliers and thousands of manufacturers interact with over one million business customers. Suppliers use Mercateo as a forward-looking sales channel that translates their performance into straightforward sales growth. Buyers achieve enormous savings potential in the procurement of business and specialist requirements.
Mercateo was looking for automated credit reports for corporate customers. 97 percent of all orders placed with Mercateo are invoice purchases. A reliable credit check with a high hit rate is therefore essential.
Decision and risk-relevant economic information should also be delivered cost-effectively and in real time. This is only possible in large quantities if the credit rating is automated.
The SCHUFA credit report contains all the essential details on master, contact and creditworthiness information, specifically: credit rating index, credit limit and default rate. Inquiry results are transmitted immediately so that Mercateo can immediately determine how solvent the company behind the inquiry is. In the creditworthiness index, the company data is also combined with the 67.5 million pieces of information on natural persons from the SCHUFA personal database - the largest of its kind in Germany. In total, around 864 million individual pieces of data can be accessed, which gives the creditworthiness index its above-average forecasting quality.
Particularly in view of the high proportion of small businesses in Mercateo's customer base, the combination of high-quality company information with payment experience from the SCHUFA personal database is essential for risk assessment.
Mercateo receives an automated credit rating with validated information from Germany's largest data pool on credit-relevant information. Thanks to the SCHUFA credit report, Mercateo has significantly reduced the proportion of defaults and can optimally manage limits and payment terms. At 0.3 percent, the default rate is very low despite the diversity and large number of (new) customers.