By David Owen
June 15 – The news and business information group Dow Jones is moving to exploit the drive for better corporate governance in the sports sector by launching Dow Jones Sports Intelligence, a new offshoot of its existing due diligence business, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance.
The new venture, to be launched later this year, will focus initially on sports bidding, an activity much in the news of late due principally to the spotlight being trained on FIFA.
As explained by Joel Lange, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance’s managing director, the sports intelligence operation will aim to provide sports federations with information on the cities and individuals seeking to go into partnership with them.
The operation will be able to draw on the work of more than 300 researchers at centres in Barcelona, London, Shanghai, Singapore and Princeton, as well as Dow’s Factiva business information and research tool, to identify potential issues.
Said Lange: “Transparency and good governance are minimum standards that need to be the goal of any sporting federation.
“In order to comply with international standards and best practice, sporting federations will need to demonstrate robust anti-money laundering and anti-corruption policies, procedures and controls.”
He said that all information gathered would come from the public domain, but would give no indication of how much sports bodies could expect to pay for the new service.
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance provides data on regulatory, commercial and reputational risk for financial institutions and corporations.
The plan eventually is for the sports intelligence unit to provide a more generalised service, helping clients to assess third party relationships and to mitigate risk.
FIFA recently announced that it was postponing the bidding process for the 2026 World Cup.
It had been intended that this would culminate with a vote at the 2017 FIFA Congress in Kuala Lumpur, a timetable that would have required the process to begin soon, with the organisation in full crisis mode.
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