At Company Watch, we help organisations manage financial risk with clarity and confidence. For Marsh Industries, that means knowing exactly who they are trading with, from the first order onwards.
Client
Marsh Industries is one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of off-mains drainage and water and wastewater treatment products. From manufacturing sites in Bridgwater and Little Addington, the company supplies sewage treatment plants, septic tanks, pump chambers and related systems to the domestic, commercial, agricultural and leisure sectors.
With one of the largest merchant networks in the country and more than a century of combined engineering experience behind its products, Marsh has built a reputation as a collaborative, trusted partner whose customers specify its products because they know they will be delivered on time and to precise specification.
That same partner network is also a commercial commitment. Supplying customers across the country means extending trade credit at scale, which makes understanding the financial health of those customers a core part of running the business.
Challenge
Every new customer account is a question of trust. Can this business pay, and will it stay solvent long enough to be a reliable partner? For a manufacturer trading on credit terms across a large network, getting that judgement right at the point of onboarding matters just as much as winning the order.
Risk does not stop once an account is open, either. An existing customer’s financial position can weaken quietly over months, turning a dependable relationship into a bad debt before there is any obvious warning. Marsh’s team needed a way to assess new customers quickly and accurately when bringing them on board, and to keep watch over existing customers continuously, so any sign of trouble surfaced early rather than after the damage was done.
Traditional credit checks often lag behind reality or miss the early signals of distress. Marsh wanted something more accurate, and more predictive.
Solution
The answer was Company Watch’s H-Score®, a single measure of corporate financial health built on seven critical financial factors and calibrated against decades of real UK company failure data.
Marsh’s team put the H-Score® to work in two places. At onboarding, it gives them a fast, accurate read on a prospective customer’s financial health before credit terms are agreed. Through ongoing monitoring, it keeps watch over existing customers, so any deterioration in a company’s score is flagged early enough to act on.
What the team values most is its accuracy. The H-Score® is designed to predict business failure before it happens, and it is that reliability, rather than a generic score, that has made it part of how Marsh manages customer risk day to day.
“We’re absolutely loving it. The H-Score® has become part of how we bring new customers on board and how we keep an eye on the ones we already work with. We trust it because it’s genuinely accurate at showing us where the risk is.”
Lydia Beaumont, Managing Director, Marsh Industries
Looking ahead: PoD®
Marsh’s team is also looking forward to Company Watch’s new PoD® (Probability of Distress®), launching soon. PoD® puts a clear, percentage-based figure on the likelihood of a company facing serious financial distress within the next one to three years, giving a forward-looking view they can plan around rather than a picture of where a company has already been.
For a team that already relies on the H-Score® for accuracy, it adds another layer of confidence when weighing up who to trade with and how much exposure to take on.
Results
With the H-Score® embedded in both onboarding and ongoing monitoring, Marsh now has a single, trusted view of customer financial health across its whole book, and a team who have become genuine advocates for it.
The benefits show up across the business:
- Faster, more confident onboarding decisions on new customers
- Early warning when an existing customer’s financial health starts to slip
- Accurate prediction of business failure the team can rely on
- One trusted view of customer risk, from the first order to every order after
A word from our CEO
“It’s always a pleasure to hear from friends of Company Watch like Lydia and the team at Marsh Industries. Seeing them put the H-Score® at the heart of how they onboard and protect their customer relationships is exactly what it was built for, and we’re proud to support a business doing such important work. We look forward to bringing them even more as they add PoD® to the mix.”
Craig Evans, CEO, Company Watch
Find out more about our holistic suite of business information solutions. Speak to a member of the sales team today.
