Monitoring a counterparty after signing

Events that change the risk

A small number of event types account for most material changes in a counterparty's risk after signing.

Each row is a monitored claim type in an OpenDossier file; when a source changes, the claim is updated with a new document date and the change is logged.

Where the signals come from

Official sources publish most of these events, often with free alerts.

• Companies House offers a free follow service that emails when a company files anything; the Gazette publishes insolvency notices with search and alerts.
• ASIC Published Notices lists insolvency and external-administration notices; ACRA and the Hong Kong Companies Registry expose filing dates that can be polled.
• SEC EDGAR provides RSS feeds by CIK and form type; 8-K filings arrive within four business days of the event.
• CourtListener provides docket alerts on RECAP-covered federal cases; state court alerts vary.
• OFAC publishes recent actions with list changes; the UN, EU, UK, MAS, DFAT and Canadian lists publish dated updates.
• Japan's 官報, official in electronic form since November 2025, carries legal notices including capital reductions, dissolutions and insolvency.
• ICANN RDAP gives domain registration data and update dates; certificate transparency logs show new TLS certificates for a domain.

Company-side signals (key-person departures, provider changes, incidents) come from the counterparty's claimed profile when it maintains one, and from its notices under the contract. OpenDossier polls the official sources on the cadence agreed for the file and records every poll, so that no change is a dated statement too.

Cadence by exposure

Monitoring everything daily is expensive and produces noise. Tier counterparties by exposure and set a cadence per tier.

Event-driven checks sit on top of the cadence: any monitored event in one section triggers a re-read of the related sections (a director change triggers sanctions re-screening of the new director; an insolvency notice triggers a litigation and charges re-read). Review the tiering itself annually; a small supplier can become critical when a product depends on it.

Avoiding alert fatigue

Alert systems fail when people stop reading them. The usual causes are duplicates, immaterial changes and alerts with no owner.

• Deduplicate across sources. One director change can surface from the registry, the Gazette and a news feed; report it once with all three citations.
• Set materiality rules per event type. A registered-office change within the same city may be informational; a new charge is always an alert; a litigation filing is an alert if the counterparty is a defendant and the claim is above a threshold or concerns the service you buy.
• Batch what can be batched. Standard-tier changes go into a weekly digest; critical-tier changes go out immediately.
• Assign an owner and an action. Every alert names who must look at it and what the expected decision is (acknowledge, re-screen, escalate, contact the counterparty).
• Close the loop. Alerts that are acknowledged with a note become part of the file; unacknowledged alerts are escalated after a set time.

In OpenDossier an alert is a changed claim with its chain; the digest shows the old and new values, the source and the date, and the acknowledgement is recorded against the file. Readers see the history, not only the latest state.

What to do when something changes

An alert is a prompt for a proportionate response, not a verdict. A practical sequence:

1. Confirm the entity match. Same-name events are the most common false alarm.
2. Read the source document, not the summary. A winding-up petition that was dismissed the same week is a different fact from one that is pending.
3. Re-read the related sections of the dossier and update the open questions.
4. Decide whether the contract gives you information or audit rights that now apply, and whether notification obligations run the other way.
5. Ask the counterparty, through its claimed profile where it has one. A prompt, evidenced reply is itself reassuring; silence is informative.
6. Record the decision and the date in the file.

This guide does not say what contractual or legal step to take; that depends on your agreement and your advisers. It describes how to keep the facts straight so that those decisions are made on the current record and can be explained later.

Monitoring the file itself

Two further items deserve a place on the schedule: the freshness of the dossier and the status of the counterparty's claimed profile.

Freshness is shown on the dossier as the age of the most recently polled fast-moving sources. If the agreed cadence is weekly and the freshness indicator reads 40 days, the monitoring has failed, and that is reported as a system event rather than hidden.

A counterparty that claimed its profile during procurement and then stops maintaining it (certificates expire without replacement, canonical answers pass their review dates, questions go unanswered) has changed its behaviour, and the file shows that as a dated pattern. Equally, a counterparty that keeps its profile current removes most of the need for you to ask, which is the point of the Trust Workspace for both sides.

At renewal, the monitoring history becomes the diligence file: a year of dated polls, alerts and acknowledgements is better evidence than a fresh questionnaire.