Insolvency signals: what Dutch bankruptcy filings tell B2B teams

Insolvency signals are the court-published records that a specific Dutch company has been declared bankrupt (faillissement) or granted a suspension of payments (surseance van betaling). Both are published by de Rechtspraak, the Dutch judiciary, in the Centraal Insolventieregister (CIR), by law and for a reason: commerce runs on knowing who can pay. Each record is a timestamped, verifiable public event attached to a KvK number, which makes insolvency data one of the few B2B triggers that works in three directions at once: as demand (a whole professional ecosystem activates around every insolvency), as defense (your own customer just became a credit risk), and as market motion (a failed competitor's customers need a new supplier this month, not next quarter).

Two signal types, two very different clocks

Slicegraph's distress family carries two types, ingested daily from the CIR, and the distinction is where most of the value sits.

suspension_of_payments (surseance van betaling) is the early one. A court has granted a company temporary protection from its creditors while it attempts to restructure. The company is still trading, still hoping to survive, but the court record says, in plain legal terms, that it cannot currently meet its obligations. Surseance often precedes bankruptcy; when it appears on a customer's KvK number, you are looking at an early warning that arrived before the unpaid invoices did.

insolvency_declared (faillissement) is the terminal one. The court has declared bankruptcy and appointed a curator. From this moment the clock runs fast: the curator inventories assets, decides on continuation or wind-down, and the company's customers, suppliers, and staff all start moving. Anyone whose business begins when a company ends, and anyone whose exposure just crystallized, needs this signal the day it publishes, not when the trade press catches up.

Same register, two moments. A credit team wants both, with the surseance weighted as the actionable early warning. A restructuring advisor wants the surseance almost exclusively. By the time the bankruptcy is declared, the mandate has usually been given.

Who actually buys on this trigger

Three distinct motions, three distinct ICPs.

Direct demand. Every insolvency generates work: curators and liquidators need valuation, auction, logistics, IT decommissioning, and legal-support services; incasso and credit-management firms prospect the creditor side; restructuring and turnaround advisors want the surseance list as their pipeline, full stop. For these teams the feed is the market.

Risk defense. Suppliers and B2B credit teams use the same feed pointed inward. Filter the distress family on the KvK numbers in your debtor book, and a surseance or bankruptcy on any of them lands in your workflow within a day of publication, early enough to freeze the credit limit, hold the next shipment, and get in the creditor queue before the letter from the curator arrives. This is the cheapest credit insurance you will ever wire up.

Market motion. When a competitor or a channel partner fails, its customers do not stop needing what it sold. They need a new supplier, urgently, and they are unusually open to a call. The framing matters here: this is a public court record, published precisely so that the market can react, and it concerns companies, not people. Lead with continuity ("we can pick up where your supplier left off"), never with the failure itself. Factual, useful, done.

What the register does and does not contain in our feed

The CIR also publishes personal debt restructurings of private individuals (WSNP). Slicegraph deliberately never ingests those. The distress family is company-level only: exclusively businesses with a KvK number, resolved exactly on that number. Natural persons are filtered out at ingestion, the same GDPR posture we apply to every source, documented per source on the sources page. Your feed contains court records about legal entities, nothing else.

Because the KvK number is right there in the court record, entity resolution for this family is exact rather than fuzzy, which is precisely what makes the debtor-book use case work.

Wiring it into a credit workflow

Here is the defensive setup, end to end.

Step 1. Pull the family and check the shape:

curl "https://slicegraph.com/api/v1/signals?family=distress&type=suspension_of_payments&since=2026-08-01" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sg_live_..."

Filter by type to split the early warnings from the declared bankruptcies, by region for a territory, or by kvk to check a single debtor. since, limit, and cursor pagination work as in every family; the full parameter list is in the API docs.

Step 2. Subscribe instead of polling. Register a webhook so new distress signals push to your credit system the day they are ingested:

curl -X POST https://slicegraph.com/api/v1/subscriptions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sg_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "target_url": "https://your-app.com/hooks/slicegraph",
    "filter": { "families": ["distress"] }
  }'

Every delivery is signed with an X-Slicegraph-Signature HMAC header, so your endpoint can verify origin before it touches a credit limit.

Step 3. Match against your debtor book. On each incoming signal, look up the KvK number against open invoices and credit limits. A suspension_of_payments match should trigger a human review and a provisional limit freeze; an insolvency_declared match should trigger the full playbook: stop shipments, file the claim with the curator, flag the account. Because the match key is the exact KvK number, false positives are essentially a non-issue.

Teams without engineering capacity get the same result as a CSV: a cleaned, deduplicated periodic list of new insolvencies and surseances to run against the ledger by hand.

Combine it with the other families

Distress signals get sharper next to the rest of the graph. A company that appears in the Peppol e-invoicing registrations feed is modernizing its billing; one that appears in the distress family is doing the opposite of modernizing. Cross-referencing families on the same KvK number (a fresh permit or tender win on one side, a surseance on the other) is how you separate "temporarily illiquid" from "structurally done," and the signals index shows everything the graph currently tracks. For prospecting teams, the inverse also holds: a portfolio you are about to sell into can be screened against the distress family before the sequence launches, so nobody spends a week pursuing a company that is already in surseance.

Pricing and the honest math

The Feed plan is €99/month for one family, and distress alone covers the credit-defense use case for most teams. Growth at €149/month adds permits, tenders, and Peppol registrations across the Netherlands and Belgium, which is where the cross-referencing plays open up. Concierge starts at €750/month if you want lists and screening run for you. Details on the pricing page, and the live feed shows signals arriving without an account.

One dodged bad-debt write-off pays for years of the feed; one restructuring mandate won off a surseance pays for it in a week.

Start with the free sample feed: tell us whether you are prospecting, defending a debtor book, or both, and we will send a real slice of recent distress signals to judge before you wire anything up. Ask at hello@slicegraph.com.