MyICC personalises tracking to business

Daniel Griffin looks at a site that brings business information to financial and legal users – and justify the cost on to clients

ICC, a provider of business and financial data, including shareholder and director details, has launched MyICC to integrate much of its current product suite into a single portal.

It provides access to 6.7 million company details in the UK and Ireland, although information on a range of other countries is also accessible. Sister products Plum and Juniper will be added to the platform along with their current client base over the course of 2007. At present MyICC users tend to be in the legal and financial markets although the user base is expected to be far more varied once integration of the legacy products is complete.

MyICC grabs its data from scanned documents supplied by – and originally filed at – CompaniesHouse. By law, all limited companies in the UK must register and supply their business details with the agency.

What MyICC does is to give users access to these company reports as fully bookmarked PDFs via a search. The level of detail and information that a user has access to is determined by the package purchased from ICC.

The interface itself is a pretty austere affair, but on the whole this works to the site’s advantage. Customising the extensive setup options can become a detailed affair, and when you are dealing with an array of financial reporting acronyms, tick boxes and dropdown menus, an absence of pretty buttons and icons leaves enough white space on the page to stop the user feeling overwhelmed.

Although the plainness of look and feel is understandable, some colour coding would help users to locate where they are in the main section tabs – Companies, MyOrders and MyPreferences.

The final delivered result consists of a formal written report from ICC as well as the scanned original. These documents can be downloaded either direct to the user’s desktop, opened up through the site or emailed to a maximum of 10 recipients. The reports are as functional in appearance as the website.

The system searches primarily by company name and thereafter requires users to drill down.

MyICC offers an impressive array of advanced search options, which is easily one of the strongest features of the platform.

Something we found a little confusing is that immediately after a report has been delivered, where to go next isn’t made particularly obvious. So while it is easy enough to determine and walk through the trail of your progress, the moment of getting your hands on a report can feel like arriving in a cul de sac.

One feature ICC is keen to promote is the Session Reference option. This has been given prominence due to users’ demand for a way to track their work, and the amount and quality of information downloaded. According to ICC, some law firms have been able to claim back up to 90% of their billing costs through using this feature as it records the amount of information consumed each time a user logs on.

With a few tweaks MyICC will prove to be a powerful platform. Its claim that it can “go anywhere in three clicks� generally proves true and we had no problems with speed nor reliability.

USABILITY

SITE DESIGN

INFORMATION DEPTH