Earlier this year, Company Watch took home three awards at the CICM British Credit Awards 2026. Two of them: Risk Management Team of the Year and the Technology Development Award recognised specific products — Vigilance™ 2.0 and Stela-AI respectively. Innovations that solve clearly defined problems. The kind of wins that are relatively straightforward to explain.
The third award is harder to pin down. Supplier of the Year doesn’t recognise a feature or a launch. It recognises everything else.
That’s what makes it different. And, honestly, that’s what makes it the one we’re most proud of.
A product award judges what you’ve built. A supplier award judges how you show up.
Technology Development Awards go to teams that ship something new and meaningful. Risk Management awards go to teams that solve a persistent, painful industry problem at scale. These are achievements measured in functionality and outcomes, demonstrable, auditable, comparable.
Supplier of the Year is a different kind of verdict. It reflects the day-to-day experience of working with a company across months and years. The quality of the data. The responsiveness when something doesn’t work as expected. Whether the platform actually fits into how your team operates. Whether the people behind it treat your problems as their problems.
You can’t manufacture that in a product roadmap. It accumulates over time, or it doesn’t accumulate at all.
Company Watch has been operating since 1998. That’s almost three decades working alongside credit and risk professionals, through economic cycles, regulatory shifts, and a business landscape that has changed almost beyond recognition. Supplier of the Year, in that context, feels like a recognition of the long game.
Why transparency is not a small thing
The credit reference industry has a reputation problem that is, to be fair, largely self-inflicted. For a long time, the dominant model was simple: buy a score, accept the number, make a decision. Don’t ask how the score was calculated, because you won’t get a straight answer.
That model is understandable from a commercial perspective. Proprietary methodology is a defensible moat. But it has a real cost. When credit professionals don’t understand how a score was built, they can’t interrogate it. They can’t explain it to a credit committee. They can’t tell whether it reflects the risk they actually care about, or whether it’s picking up noise from somewhere upstream in the model.
At Company Watch, transparency is not a marketing line. It is a design principle. Our clients can see exactly how our scores are constructed, interrogate the underlying data, and input their own assumptions to pressure-test the output.
What three decades of predicting insolvency actually means
Industry longevity is only worth citing if it means something measurable. In our case, it does.
Since 1998, Company Watch has predicted nearly 90% of public company insolvencies in advance, an accuracy rate that has held across multiple recessions, a global pandemic, and the highest interest rate environment in a generation. That figure reflects decades of model refinement, data investment, and a sustained commitment to getting the analytical fundamentals right.
The clients who rely on Company Watch to identify financial distress are often making decisions with real consequences: extending credit, onboarding a supplier, committing to a long-term contract. Being wrong is not a theoretical problem. It is a financial one.
The longevity of our track record is part of what clients are buying when they choose us. They are not adopting an emerging tool with a promising backtest. They are working with a methodology that has been stress-tested by the market itself, repeatedly, over nearly three decades.
Tools built around the decision, not the dataset
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback we hear from clients is about how Company Watch fits into the way their teams actually work. Not the headline features, the day-to-day workflow.
Our platform is built around the decisions credit and risk professionals need to make, rather than around the data we happen to hold. That distinction matters more than it might initially seem.
A snapshot of the Company Watch platform.
Stress-testing a supplier’s financial health shouldn’t require downloading a spreadsheet and running scenarios manually. Identifying Rapid Succession director activity shouldn’t mean cross-referencing Companies House records one by one. Searching for specific risk language buried inside thousands of filed accounts shouldn’t take an analyst an afternoon.
Over the past year, clients ran over 4,200 Experiments using our highly regarded stress-testing functionality. In addition, a further 4,000 scenarios were executed using our pre-defined Scenario tool; including margin squeeze, demand reduction, and key customer insolvency—where stress testing can be completed in seconds rather than hours.
Our Rapid Succession tool, a UK first when we launched it, has been used by nearly a third of our client base to date, collectively identifying over 1,500 Rapid Succession companies and directors. For the SMEs and lenders using it, that is not a usage statistic. It is exposure avoided before it reached the balance sheet.
Watch: Q4 UK Profit Warnings Explained
Company Watch CEO Craig Evans and EY-Parthenon’s Kirsten Tompkins unpack the Q4 2025 data on UK profit warnings.
We receive a lot of client feedback. Some of it is about specific features. Some of it is about outcomes, the fraud that was caught, the supplier that failed six months after our model flagged it, the credit decision that held up in an audit.
But the feedback that tells you the most about whether you’re actually succeeding as a supplier isn’t about a product launch. It’s about trust. About whether a team feels confident enough in your data to base a significant decision on it. About whether your platform is the one they open first, or the one they use to check a box.
When credit professionals describe Company Watch as the tool they rely on every day, not one of several they check, but the one they reach for, that’s the signal that something beyond the technology is working.
Winning Supplier of the Year at the CICM British Credit Awards, the most respected evening in the UK credit industry calendar, confirms that signal is real.
What comes next
Being recognised as Supplier of the Year raises the standard for everything we do next. It is a validation of the approach, client-first, transparent, analytically rigorous, and a reminder of what that approach actually demands in practice.
We’ll keep investing in the data, the models, and the tools. We’ll keep listening to what credit and risk professionals actually need from a supplier rather than what we think they should want. And we’ll keep treating the trust that Supplier of the Year represents as something that has to be earned again, continuously.
That’s what the award means to us. Not a destination. A bar.
Rimsha is Marketing Executive at Company Watch, responsible for producing research-led content and insights that help organisations navigate risk and regulatory change.
