Global Database vs Moody's Orbis

Moody’s Orbis — the company-data product most people mean when they compare "Moody’s" for company and ownership information — began life as Bureau van Dijk (BvD), an independent data provider that Moody's acquired in 2017 and folded into its analytics business. Since then, Orbis has continued the aggregation model BvD was built on: it licenses and blends company data from third-party providers rather than sourcing every record directly.

That inherited model delivers real breadth, but it also means the underlying data's freshness, format, and provenance depend on whatever the licensed vendor supplies — and reselling that data onward is governed by the terms Moody's itself inherited from BvD's original licensing agreements.

Global Database takes a different starting point: data is sourced directly, with the source, link, timestamp, and official filing published against each record. On top of that direct-sourced layer, Global Database adds a global ownership graph spanning 45M+ companies and 500M+ people, OCR-and-AI-digitized financials mapped consistently across countries, M&A and deal history, PEPs and sanctions screening, bank account verification, and people/contact data — with flexible reseller rights for enterprise clients who want to build on top of it.

"An aggregated dataset can only be as current as the vendor it was licensed from. A directly sourced record can always be traced back to the original filing."

For a one-off financial risk score in a market Moody's already covers well, its aggregated model is a reasonable fit. Where flexible resale rights, direct-to-source provenance, or a unified ownership graph across companies and people is the requirement, that's where Global Database is built to lead.

Moody’s, as an aggregator, licenses much of its underlying data from third-party vendors — which means what you can do with the data downstream is shaped by those inherited licensing terms, not a single, unified policy.

Global Database offers flexible reseller rights on enterprise plans: clients can integrate the data into their own product, resell it, or build derivative products directly on top of it, since the data is sourced and owned by Global Database's own pipeline rather than re-licensed from elsewhere.