Dow Jones announced today that it will expand its highly successful Risk & Compliance due diligence business into the sports industry with the launch of Dow Jones Sports Intelligence. Dow Jones Risk and Compliance is a market leading data provider on regulatory, commercial and reputational risk for financial institutions and global corporations. Sports bodies around the world are now being identified as high risk organizations due to regulatory or legal changes and current events. In December, the Swiss Government revised Anti-Money Laundering guidelines, making executives of the world sports federations, such as FIFA, subject to stricter money laundering checks by global banks. Last week, the Swiss government paved the way to tighten corruption laws whereby investigations into corruption at international sports organisations may be launched if there is a threat to public interest. “It’s clear that the expectation of governments, banks and sponsors is that sporting organizations will now be held to similar governance standards as the regulated community,” said Joel Lange, Managing Director of Dow Jones Risk & Compliance. “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.” The Dow Jones Sports Intelligence business, which is due to launch later this year, will focus initially on the sports bidding industry and the stakeholders involved in bid processes for major sporting events, including international sports federations, countries and cities. Dow Jones then plans to expand Dow Jones Sports Intelligence to the sports industry more generally as a service for all sports stakeholders when assessing existing and new third party relationships and mitigating risk. Dow Jones Sports Intelligence will have a dedicated team preparing bespoke reports to the specific compliance needs of individual sports stakeholders leveraging a multi-lingual global research team. The concept, which has been developed by the Dow Jones Risk & Compliance team, has received specialist sports input from leading industry player, UK-based The Sports Consultancy.
