A report is not a decision.

Public records, regulatory filings, court and patent records, tender portals, licensed databases and news services, trade press, company publications, expert conversations conducted under disclosed terms, and your own internal data where you provide it. Every source is entered in a register with its licence terms and legal basis before an analyst may use it, and your legal function reviews that register at the Define gate and annually thereafter. We do not misrepresent who we are or whom we work for, we do not approach a competitor's staff for confidential information, and we do not buy documents that a seller had no right to sell. Competition law shapes the competitor work: what may be collected about a rival, what may be shared with whom inside your organisation, and what must never be exchanged with the rival itself, is written into the collection boundaries before the function starts.

The function works inside a confidentiality agreement that covers your decisions, your questions and our findings, and the questions a board is asking are treated as the most sensitive material of all, since they reveal intent. Working papers and positions live in a data plane you approve, in Switzerland, the European Union, Jordan or the United States, or on your own infrastructure. Access is limited to the named team, conflict checks are run before any engagement in an adjacent sector, and we do not accept a mandate from a direct competitor for the life of the engagement and an agreed period after it. What we learn about you is never reused for another client, in aggregate or otherwise.

Every position carries a chain: the sources behind it, the extract relied on, the date each source was retrieved, its reliability rating, the corroboration found or not found, and the analyst and reviewer who signed it. A director can ask for the chain on any sentence and receive it. Where the evidence is thin, the memo says so in the confidence line rather than hiding it in the prose, states what assumption fills the gap, and names the indicator that would confirm or overturn the position. A weak position is still useful if its weakness is honest; a confident position built on a single unverified source is the thing this practice exists to prevent.

The cadence is the board's own. Positions are delivered before each scheduled meeting in a memo form agreed with the chairman and the company secretary, short enough to be read in full and structured so that the question, the position, the confidence, the recommendation and the owner are visible on the first page. Between meetings, monitoring alerts go to the named owner when a held position is no longer safe, not to the whole board. Committees with their own cycles, such as risk, audit or investment, receive their own memos on the same standard. Nothing is delivered because it is interesting; it is delivered because a decision depends on it.

A subscription answers the questions its publisher chose, for every customer at once, and carries no accountability for how you act on it. Broker coverage serves the broker's business first. This practice starts from your decision calendar, collects for your questions only, shows its sources, and puts a named analyst's judgement behind each position. Subscriptions remain useful as sources, and the register will typically include several. What they cannot provide is the reading, the corroboration and the accountability, which is where a board's confidence actually comes from.

You do. Positions, memos, scenario records, the decision calendar, the source register as configured for you and the function design are deliverables assigned to you on payment. Altuon retains its methods, templates and tooling and licenses them to you for the life of the function. Third-party sources stay under their own licences, which is why the register records each one; on exit, those licences are novated to you or replaced, and the memo tells you which. Nothing we produce for you is shared with, or reused for, any other client.

Taking the function in-house is a designed outcome, not an exit clause. From the Build phase your analysts work alongside ours, the runbook is written for them, and the source contracts are set up so they can be transferred. On exit, you receive the complete archive of positions and evidence chains in an open format, the register with every licence and its status, the tooling configuration, and a handover period during which our team remains available to your analysts. Key-person risk is addressed by having every position reviewed by a second analyst from the start, so no finding depends on one head.