How The Channel Standard operates
The channel has long run on undisclosed practices: how matches are made, how suppliers are ranked, who pays for visibility, what happens to advisor data and how pricing works. This page is our comparison case.
Last updated October 15, 2026. Material changes are dated and previous versions are kept.
Watch Companion work
Score every supplier against your deal and see the reasoning behind every score.
Commitments
To advisors
- You own your data, always.
- You see how the platform reasons about supplier matches.
- You are never sold to a supplier as a lead.
- Companion is free.
- Your client data is not shared without your explicit decision on a specific opportunity.
- Your data is not used to train models that benefit other advisors or suppliers.
To suppliers
- Match logic is identical for every supplier regardless of subscription tier.
- No priority placement, no sponsored ranking, no pay-for-visibility path.
- Tiers differ in capabilities, not in how advisors see you.
- You see what drives your match scores.
- Introductions route through your existing TSD (technology services distributor) relationships and deal registration workflow.
To TSDs
- Commercial relationships continue to flow through your organization.
- We do not integrate with TSD systems or collect data from TSDs.
- Companion sits upstream, in the discovery layer.
- Deals discovered on the platform run through the same infrastructure as your existing deal flow.
Data handling and security
What Companion collects
- Opportunity context advisors enter to receive supplier matches
- Supplier capability profiles that suppliers maintain themselves
- Engagement signals that improve match quality over time
What we never do with it
- Sell data collected through Companion
- Share advisor client information with suppliers without explicit advisor consent on a specific opportunity
- Use advisor data to train models that benefit unrelated advisors or suppliers
- Retain client data after an advisor deletes it
Security
Companion meets SOC 2 standards and is actively pursuing SOC 2 Type II certification, with encrypted data, role-based access controls and account-level authentication.
Request a security reviewWhy an independent company has to create these tools
Transparency like this only holds when a company has no reason to bend it. That takes four conditions:
- No commission interest
- No representation interest
- No TSD volume-bonus ties
- No book-of-business interest
The Channel Standard meets these conditions because we built the company around them from the start, not because we discovered them later and adapted.
See something that doesn’t match?
Questions, supplier security reviews, or anything on the platform that contradicts this page.