Bureau van Dijk (BvD) is a publisher of business information that specialized on private firms, combined with an established software to conduct financial analysis on a firm. BvD offers various products/databases that focused on firm’s finance, merger and acquisition (M&A), transfer pricing, compliance, firms’ risk, procurement and supplier, credit risk, academic research, and business development. The products offered are Osiris, Orbis, BankFokus, EIU DataServices, and Zephyr. This information is presented by Margaretha Cahaya, Assistant Director, Business Development, Bureau van Dijk (BvD), during the introduction on the Training of BankFocus Banking and Finance Database, hosted by the Center of Research and Community Service Program of the FEB UNS, on Thursday September 12th, 2019.
“In a research a valid and reliable data is important, BvD provides service to fulfil these needs, thus the data collection process will be easier and faster to do. The data provided by BvD is a raw data, which is different from the data provided in research article. Therefore, it is expected that by using a high quality data, the quantity and quality of research publication will increase, and enhancing the universities’ ranking,” she explains.
Meanwhile, Benny Kesuma, the Head of Credit Solutions APAC BvD, provides an explanation on the usage of BankFocus in front of the participants, who consist of FEB UNS Faculty member, PhD students, and representative from Indonesia universities partners in Erasmus+ Optbank, namely Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), Universitas Syiah Kuala, Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah, Universitas Tanjungpura, and Universitas Sriwijaya. He explains that BankFocus is initially builds to solve banking sectors problems, because the banking sectors are actually connected one another. For instance, in conducting a business transaction such as export and import, the transaction is conducted between banks in different countries, thus each bank needs to do an analysis on the other bank before deciding to accept the transaction.
BankFocus is among the first banking financial database that provide the data from around 45,00 banks around the world. This will facilitate the banks’ analyst and researchers (lecturer) in conducting a research in banking sector, thus they are no longer needs to compile the data directly from the annual report. “We provide three data formats in BankFocus to support different type of research, the first one is national format (country specific format) that can support very detail data. This type of data is suitable for research within a country. The second data format is global detail format, which provide the data and financial ratios that are universally accepted, thus suitable for cross-countries research. Lastly the global standard format provides the global (international) data that usually used in financial analysis,” he explained in detail.
Currently there are many big banks such as JP Morgan, and big national banks in Indonesia such as BNI and Mandiri that uses BankFocus in conducting analysis. Aside from the financial data, BankFocus also provides other data such as ownership structure. All of the data provided in BankFocus is gathered from three resources firms’ annual report, regulatory source, and Moody’s analytic.
At the end of the session, the participants are encouraged to do a trial in using the BankFocus database.