I am not sure I follow you. IR at GGLB said that they contracted EC3 to undertake the technical platforms for which GGLB was incapable of conducting themselves as they do/did not have that capability in-house. As part of the contract EC3 was also given license to use the GGLB brand as part of the payment.
GGLB informed me that they hired EC3 not the other way around. Again I am just going by what GGLB said in an email to me and I posted it verbatim here. It clearly says GGLB contracted EC3. The email from IR also says that GGLB "granted" not sold the license for the benchmarking. Perhaps that was in lieu of cash, or to allow EC3 to act as a representive of the brand since they were hired by GGLB to develop the tech platform.