Existence, standing and ownership where the register is public, in the jurisdiction the counterparty actually operates from rather than the one on the letterhead.
Due diligence
Is the counterparty real?
Somebody sent you an offer, a mandate and a set of documents, and something about it does not sit right. Before you sign, before you open an instrument, before you fly anywhere: we check who they are, whether the paper is coherent, and whether they clear the sanctions regimes that apply. Then we tell you plainly what we could not confirm.
What this is
Phase 01 of the protocol, sold on its own.
This is not a new service. The deliverables are the ones ALCA already promises under Assess & Audit: an audit report, a risk register graded one to five, the regulatory picture, and a viability assessment that ends in a recommendation to proceed or to stop.
What is new is that you can buy that phase without committing to the mandate that normally follows it. The protocol already says that clients who engage us only to execute are sent back to these phases first, so selling the first one on its own is consistent with what the page has always said rather than an exception to it.
Screening of the parties, the vessels and the jurisdictions against the sanctions regimes that apply to your transaction, stamped with the date and time it was run.
Whether the documents are coherent with each other and with how the real instruments of this market are written. This is the part a database cannot do for you.
Whether the terms are plausible for that product, that route and that volume. An impossible discount on an impossible allocation is a finding, not a bargain.
What it is built on
The counterparty report is built on three sources: the documents you send us, public registers, and official lists, including the sanctions lists. Everything it states can be traced back to one of them.
It does not include interviews, surveillance or non-public information: what you receive is what can be checked and cited.
The rule
We do not assess our own introductions.
We do not assess a counterparty we introduced. If the seller came from our book, they are already verified and we do not charge you to confirm it: that is what the commission pays for. If you brought the counterparty, that is where this service begins.
T&T earns commission on transactions. Verifying the counterparty to a deal we are also broking would be acting as judge and party, and a sophisticated buyer sees that in five seconds. So the rule is published, and it is a field on the form rather than a sentence in a paragraph: a rule the system cannot apply is an intention. If you tell us we introduced them, the answer comes back that there is nothing to sell you.
What the report says
Both lists, and the second one is the valuable half.
What it can state
- Screening against the applicable regimes, with the date and time it was run.
- Corporate existence and standing, wherever the register is public.
- Whether the documents are coherent with each other, and with how the real instruments of this market are drafted.
- Whether the commercial terms are plausible for that product, route and volume.
- A risk register, graded by severity.
- A recommendation to proceed or to stop, with the conditions attached to it.
What it never promises
- That the counterparty is legitimate.
- That the transaction will close.
- That there is no fraud.
- Legal advice.
- A credit opinion.
The principle
The report says what was verified, what could not be verified, and what that difference means.
The value is often in the second list. "We could not confirm that this refinery has any relationship with this seller" is the most valuable sentence we can write for you, and you hear it before you are billed rather than after, because a client who paid to be told nothing was found has been sold something worthless.
A screening is true at an instant.
Sanctions lists move every week, so the report carries the hour it was run and says so in as many words. We are not going to pretend otherwise to make the document feel more permanent than it is. If you come back to the same counterparty months later, that is a new report.
Turnaround
3 business days.
A fixed price needs a fixed deadline, or it is a quotation with extra steps. The competitor here is not another screening provider: it is going ahead without checking anything, and a report that arrives after you had to decide loses to that. Three days arrives in time to change what you do.
When the clock starts
When the payment reaches us: immediately with a card, and with a bank transfer when the funds land, which we confirm to you in writing the same day. If something we need is missing, you hear about it within hours and the clock pauses until it arrives. It does not start "when the file is complete", which would leave you guessing whether your submission counted and would put the burden of our response time on you.
And if a register is slow
It is delivered on time regardless. If a register does not answer within the deadline, that goes in the report as part of what could not be verified. We never hold a delivery waiting for a third party, because the report already promises to name the difference between what was checked and what was not.
If we miss it
30% of the price comes back to you. You paid before the work started, so this is a refund and not a credit against something you might buy later, and we apply it ourselves rather than waiting to be asked: a remedy you have to claim is a remedy designed not to be paid. The clock is the one above, three business days from the payment reaching us, less any time it was paused while something we had asked for was missing. It covers the two fixed-price reports. The ALCA phases are scoped to the engagement and publish no deadline to miss.
Pricing
Published, because a product has a price.
A fixed number on the counterparty report is what makes it something you can buy without a call first. The larger engagements say "from", because they scale with the size of the transaction and pretending otherwise would be opaque in the other direction.
- Counterparty report
- USD 1,200
- Transaction report
- USD 3,500
- ALCA Phase 01, complete
- from USD 9,000
- ALCA Phases 02 and 03
- from USD 12,000
The report is credited against the mandate if you engage us for ALCA within 60 days of receiving it. You should not pay twice for the same work.
How you pay
The two fixed-price reports can be paid online by card when you send the form, through Stripe’s secure checkout, and the deadline runs from that payment. If you would rather pay by invoice, by card inside the invoice or by bank transfer, send the form without paying and we invoice you once we have confirmed there is something to do. If it turns out we introduced the counterparty to you, there is nothing to verify and the payment is refunded in full. Everything is quoted and invoiced in US dollars (USD). We never send bank details by any other route, and an email asking you to pay a different account is not from us.
Net prices. EU business clients with a valid VAT number account for VAT under the reverse charge.
Request
Due diligence
Tell us what you need.
Verification is the one with a fixed price and a fixed deadline, so it asks for everything needed to start work without a call first. The other two are scoped in conversation either way, so they ask for very little.
Talk to an advisor
Not sure what you need yet?
Book an hour with an advisor: one deal, one counterparty, one document set. USD 150 per hour, in your own time zone.