Building PoD®: Why We Created a New Risk Score

What does it take to build a new business risk score from scratch, and why build one at all when you already have a trusted one? In this conversation, three of the people behind PoD® (Probability of Distress) talk about how Company Watch's new risk score came about. They are Craig Evans (CEO), Chris Oatts (Head of Data & Product Strategy) and Jonathan Davies (Lead Data Scientist). PoD® goes live on 21st October. They cover: 🔹 Why build a new score alongside the H-Score®, rather than replace it 🔹 How much more UK and Irish data, modern machine learning and our own proprietary data (like Vigilance™) opened up 🔹 Covering companies that were hard to score before, such as newly incorporated businesses and "thin file" companies 🔹 Keeping it transparent: using Shapley values to show why a score is what it is 🔹 Why PoD® is a real percentage rather than a 0–100 score, and how it helps with expected loss and bad debt provision 🔹 Designing risk bands that work for both simple and highly technical users 🔹 What two beta programmes taught us, and why PoD® launches straight into monitoring and the API 🔹 12 months of performance tracking before launch, and why the model will keep improving Customers told us they want to know faster, and they want to know why. PoD® is our answer. 📅 PoD® launches 21st October 2026 🔗 Find out more: https://www.companywatch.net/pod-a-12... 📩 Book a demo: https://www.companywatch.net/ About Company Watch: Company Watch helps businesses avoid financial loss with predictive risk insight built on UK and Irish company data. Our scores, alerts and analytics are used by credit, risk, insurance, procurement and advisory teams to spot distress early and to back healthy businesses with confidence. #PoD #RiskScore #CreditRisk #CompanyWatch #BusinessRisk #Insolvency #DataScience #MachineLearning #TradeCredit #Procurement #RiskManagement